Disraeli (Reputations)

REPUTATIONS

Already published THOMAS MORE LOUIS XVI DISRAELI

John Guy John Hardman Edgar Feuchtwanger

Titles in preparation include HENRY II THOMAS BECKET HENRY VII HENRY VIII ELIZABETH I CROMWELL NAPOLEON CAVOUR LINCOLN GLADSTONE NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN STALIN ED. ROOSEVELT J.E KENNEDY MARTIN LUTHER KING THATCHER

John Gillingham Anne Duggan John Guy Greg Walker Susan Doran J.C. Davis R.S. Alexander Eugenio Biagini Peter J. Parish David Bebbington David Dutton Sarah Davies Patrick J. Maney Robert David Johnson John White E.H.H. Green

DISRAELI

Edgar Feuchtwanger Formerly Reader in History, University of Southampton

A member of the Hodder Headline Group

LONDON Distributed in the United States of America by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Arnold, a member of the Hodder Headline Group, 338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH http://www.arnoldpublishers.com Distributed in the United States of America by Oxford University Press Inc., 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY10016 © 2000 Edgar Feuchtwanger All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency: 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. The advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of going to press, but neither the author nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0 340 71909 5 (hb) ISBN 0 340 71910 9 (pb) 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Typeset in 10 on 12 pt Sabon by Phoenix Photosetting, Chatham, Kent Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd.

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Contents

General editorial preface Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Genius and man about town 1804-1837 Politics and domesticity 1837-1841 Young England 1841-1845 Into the lead 1845-1849 Towards office 1849-1852 A long haul 1853-1859 Frustration and triumph 1859-1868 Up and down the greasy pole 1868-1874 Apotheosis 1874-1 878 Anticlimax 1878-1881 Afterlife: the rise of the Disraeli myth

Notes Select bibliography Chronology Index

vii ix 1 29 43 61 79 95 119 143 167 194 210

219 230 233 237

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General editorial preface

Hero or villain? Charlatan or true prophet? Sinner or saint? The volumes in the Reputations series examine the reputations of some of history's most conspicuous, powerful, and influential individuals, considering a range of representations, some of striking incompatibility. The aim is not merely to demonstrate that history is indeed, in Pieter Geyl's phrase, 'argument without end' but that the study even of contradictory conceptions can be fruitful: that the jettisoning of one thesis or presentation leaves behind something of value. In Iago's self-serving denunciation of it, reputation is 'an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving', but a more generous definition would allow its use as one of the principal currencies of historical understanding. In seeking to analyse the cultivation, creation, and deconstruction of reputation we can understand better the well-springs of action, the workings out of competing claims to power, the different purposes of rival ideologies - in short, see more clearly ways in which the past becomes History. There is a commitment in each volume to showing how understanding of an individual develops (sometimes in uneven and divergent ways), whether in response to fresh evidence, the emergence or waning of dominant ideologies, changing attitudes and preoccupations of the age in which an author writes, or the creation of new historical paradigms. Will Hitler ever seem quite the same after the evidence of a recent study revealing the extent of his Jewish connections during the Vienna years? Reassessment of Lenin and Stalin has been given fresh impetus by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of many of its archives; and the end of the Cold War and of its attendant assumptions must alter our views of Eisenhower and Kennedy. How will our

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perceptions of Elizabeth I change in the presence of a new awareness of 'gendered history'? There is more to the series than illumination of ways in which recent discoveries or trends have refashioned identities or given actions new meaning - though that is an important part. The corresponding aim is to provide readers with a strong sense of the channels and course of debate from the outset: not a Cook's Tour of the historiography, but identification of the key interpretative issues and guidance as to how commentators of different eras and persuasions have tackled them.

Introduction

Disraeli's contemporaries derived their perceptions of him as much from his writings as from his actions as a politician. In his novel Tancred he had made much of the phrase 'the great Asian mystery' and to many of his countrymen he was the Asian mystery. Even his personal friends often found it difficult to understand him and would explain their puzzlement by his habit of mystification. Disraeli did not share much of the prevailing ethos of the era in which he played so prominent a role. He often wrote and spoke of 'prigs and pedants' and of a freemasonry of prigs, 'which never fails'.1 It was his way of signalling that he stood outside the moralizing Victorian cult of character. He was not unique in being an outsider in the Victorian age, but none of the major holders of power in his time were outsiders in as many ways as Disraeli was. Now, more than a hundred years after his death, mystery and mystification are less of an obstacle to understanding him. Disraeli was an outsider not only because of his Jewishness, which he could not escape even if he had tried. He did not share the public school and university background common to most of the political elite. He had a strong conviction that he was a genius set apart from the common ruck of humanity, though for a long time he was not sure in which direction this genius should take him. Literature was the most obvious arena for satisfying his burning ambition. In this field his many unorthodoxies would prove no obstacle. There were early signs that the pen would fail to fulfil him and that he hankered to prove himself as a man of action. It soon became apparent that as a literary genius he fell well short of the top. If he could not be a Byron, how could the son of a moderately distinguished Jewish literary man, a middleclass boy from Bloomsbury, become a Napoleon in constitutional,

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parliamentary, aristocratic England? He may have looked and acted exotic, but underneath Venice, Constantinople and Jerusalem there was Holborn.2 Disraeli wrestled with these dilemmas as a romantic hero and martyr in the mould of Goethe's Werther, self-obsessed to the point of narcissism. Much of his literary output is permeated by the struggle for self-identification. For him more than for most men his identity was not predetermined, but could be constructed and reinvented to suit the circumstances in which he found himself. Many of his early literary ventures were autobiographical attempts to find his identity and locate himself in an environment in which he felt himself to be without a ready-made habitat. Through Mme de Stael he had imbibed something of German idealist philosophy and believed that the senses and the will of the subject could shape reality. Unlike Werther the world's hostility did not push him into suicide, but only into a prolonged bout of nervous prostration. He emerged with a will more steeled and a determination more absolute to impose his genius upon the world. He was also something of a Renaissance man, who believed that it was up to the man of virtii to seize his chance when fortunu beckoned. Not surprisingly, a hostile world marked him out as an adventurer and a charlatan. The great change in Disraeli's life'came when he entered parliament in 1837 and, more especially, when the Tory schism of 1846 made him into a major political figure and eventually into a party leader. Fortunu beckoned and he made the most of it. Now he became, not exactly Napoleon, but at least a national leader in the most powerful parliamentary assembly in the world. Parliament, a defining institution of the nineteenth century, became the instrument of his triumph, even though he did not share many of its values and assumptions. It was a dream come true, but his leadership proved to be a crown of thorns and real power eluded him until it was almost too late. Inevitably he had now to conform at least outwardly to the prevailing ethos and take on protective colouring. There was a distinct change of gear in his life, something that went beyond that abandonment of youthful idealism and indiscretion that happens so often. When in 1853 an edition of his novels appeared a good deal was edited out. By a great effort of will and by iron self-discipline he acquired the mask of respectability that was rarely allowed to slip. He assumed the gruvitus of the senate, while using his mastery of language, irony and image to make its members listen

Introduction

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to him. From writing romantic fantasies he turned to the drafting of state papers and diplomatic dispatches. Since the age of twenty-one he had been so heavily encumbered with debts that he had acquired the habits of a con-man to keep the moneylenders at bay. Now he had to maintain the credit of the world's most powerful economy. There had to be mystification and to many he remained a mystery, more often sinister than not. Even when he was on the verge of becoming a national figure and was writing the trilogy of novels, Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred, on which his literary reputation largely rests, he was still more concerned with constructing his identity than with making himself publicly acceptable. His strange theology, through which he harmonized his Jewishness with a Christian society, made him few friends. He was writing as someone the nation might occasionally listen to as a wayward prophet, but who could hardly expect to become its leader. Inevitably, much of what has been written about Disraeli, and on which his reputation was and is based, treats him as a Victorian statesman and judges him by the standards expected of the political leaders of that age. The questions raised are about the substance of his popular conservatism or of his imperialism, or whether he should be credited with having laid the foundations of the modern Conservative party. The monumental biography of Monypenny and Buckle, written in the early twentieth century, puts a gloss of respectability on his early life, where it does not conceal it altogether. It is only in our less censorious days that the full spectrum of his personality has been revealed and explored. In his own lifetime Disraeli sometimes threw a veil over his true self, but he never recanted or truly denied himself. When a collected edition of his novels appeared in 1870, by which time he had already been prime minister once and in the second reform bill had reshaped the country's political institutions, he wrote a preface stressing the consistency of the ideas that had always guided him. In writing about Disraeli today, justice has to be done to him as a man of ideas as well as to his reputation as a major operator on the British political scene. As a purveyor of ideas and as a writer he was not in the first rank of originality, but he had the ability to absorb a wide range of influences and reflect them with great panache. In revealing himself as fully as he did in his writings he gave hostages to fortune which might have crippled the career of a lesser man. In his case the fertility of his imagination helped him

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to paint images and coin phrases that for posterity were more significant than the evanescent political triumphs of the moment. Nowadays one would call him a master of the sound-bite and in standing outside his time he appears more modern than most of his contemporaries. The Victorian political scene has been as thoroughly researched and elucidated as any, and Disraeli's concrete achievements may now look limited, but the exceptional personal qualities he brought to political leadership still render him fascinating.

Ill Genius and man about town 1804-1 837 On 27 February 1868 Disraeli formally kissed hands as prime minister for the first time. The day before Queen Victoria had written to her daughter, the Crown Princess of Prussia: ‘Mr. Disraeli is Prime Minister! A good thing for a Man “risen from the people” to have obtained!” When Disraeli was born, on 21 December 1804, it would have seemed the most improbable of destinies that he should become prime minister of England at the height of her power. It is the fairy-tale character of his life that continues to fascinate. Politicians and commentators can bandy his name about because it still rings a bell with the modern public. It is difficult to pin down precisely why Disraeli’s rise should have seemed so much of a fairy tale. Queen Victoria did not get it quite right, for Disraeli’s origins were not particularly humble. He did not, it is true, come from the charmed circle which, until well into the nineteenth century, provided the bulk of the political ilite at Westminster. In 1851, when it first looked as if Disraeli might become a minister, the queen and Prince Albert did not approve of him. Lord Derby, his chief, told the queen, so Disraeli himself later recorded: ‘Madam, Mr Disraeli has had to make his position, and men who make their positions will say and do things which are not necessary to be said or done by those for whom positions are provided.’Z Disraeli did not come from a background which ensures that positions are provided, but neither had he risen from the people. His grandfather, the elder Benjamin, had already attained affluence, having come to England in 1748 from Cento, near Ferrara, in the Papal States. His son Isaac, intended for a career in business, rebelled against

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Disraeli

his fate and was finally allowed to follow his literary bent. He spent most of his life in his library and in the Reading Room of the British Museum, becoming a man of letters with a minor talent, but a considerable reputation. Benjamin the younger was therefore in the third generation, the first having accumulated wealth and laid the foundations for gentrification; the second turning from trade to more congenial pursuits. By the third generation the transformation is so firmly established that all choices, including dissipation, become possible. With Disraeli the joker in the pack was that the family was Jewish. Isaac, his father, was an example, almost but not quite, of the kind of radical assimilation that was unique to the situation of Jews in eighteenth-century England. Most of the Jewish community in England were Sephardic Jews. Some were of Marrano or crypto-Jewish origin, with an ambivalent attitude towards Judaism. The wealthier among them had often taken the path into the landed gentry that had become common among their Gentile trading partners. Their ties with Judaism and the Jewish community atrophied and intermarriage obliterated their Jewish links altogether. The elder Benjamin was not in the highest echelons of the Sephardic community where such a transition most often occurred. What the D'Israeli family had in common with many English Sephardic Jews was the gradual attenuation of Jewish practices and observances. Such was the case with the elder Benjamin and even more with his wife, Sarah. Her grandson said of her that she was 'so mortified by her social position that she lived until eighty without indulging in a tender expression, foresaw for her child only future degradation'.3 She evidently regarded her Jewishness as a misfortune and, according to her grandson, died an 'informal Protestant' and was buried in Willesden church. Her husband, however, fully maintained their ties with the Jewish community. Isaac, their son, was a man of the Enlightenment, a follower of Voltaire. His ideology moved him further away from Judaism towards a theism that regarded all forms of revealed religion with scepticism. The paraphernalia of rabbinical Judaism was despised as obscurantist lumber. This is what Disraeli, much later in life, may well have meant when he wrote that 'I... was not bred among my race, and was nurtured in great prejudice against them',4 or he may have been thinking of his grandmother's attitude. Isaac paid his annual subscription to the Bevis Marks congregation, but told the synagogue authorities that their inflexible practices had lost them many members and

Genius and man about town 1804-1 83 7

3

that ‘the larger part of your society’ had become ‘partly Jew, partly Gentile’.5 It may well have been the death of the elder Benjamin in November 3 816, which put Isaac in receipt of his inheritance of L35,000, that finally removed any inhibitions about cutting his formal links with the Jewish community. The following July he had his four surviving children baptized. This step proved to be the essential prerequisite for the younger Benjamin’s later political career. Isaac D’Israeli’s move was not a grand gesture of apostasy, which would have been alien to his nature anyway. He may well have wanted to free his children from what he had come to see as a pointless burden, but he himself was not baptized. He remained a Jew and retained his interest in his Jewish heritage. There was no change of name and only the younger Benjamin later dropped the apostrophe from the family name, in which his brothers and sister followed him. Benjamin could not have disguised his origins, had he wanted to, for he looked Jewish, Mediterranean, exotic. When he became sufficiently prominent to be an obvious target for hostility, the diatribes against him were, as often as not, barbed with antiSemitism, for there was no taboo on the public expression of anti-Semitic prejudice. Disraeli adopted attack as the best means of defence. Self-hatred, often the price of assimilation, was not in his nature and, as his career developed, he reinvented his Jewishness to fit in with his personal needs. Jewishness was not the only maverick ingredient that gave Disraeli’s rise the appearance of an improbable fairy tale. His entry into the narrow, mostly aristocratic political ruling class of Victorian England was not by any of the usual routes. British society was sufficiently open to offer such avenues, by way of education through the public schools and the two older universities, or through meritocratic professions like the law. Disraeli took none of these routes. There is no convincing explanation why he, clever and gifted, was not sent to a public school, while his two younger brothers, unremarkable even as boys, were later sent to Winchester. According to Disraeli’s own account his father intended to send him there, but his mother resisted. Perhaps there were early signs of the emotional instability and ill-health that in his twenties produced a breakdown. This may have made it inadvisable to expose him to the rough and tumble of a public school in the days before the reforms of Dr Arnold. Disraeli clearly resented the decision in

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later life and it may be one of the grievances he had against his mother. She receives hardly any mention from him in all the emanations of his prolific pen. His outsize ego and assertiveness may have been sharpened by a feeling of insufficient maternal attention and love. His description of life at Eton in Coningsby is suffused with a sentimental glow, suggesting an Eldorado from which the author was excluded. Emotional friendships between boys, something that did not then arouse the suspicions it would now, are lovingly described, perhaps because he felt it was another experience he had missed. He was never really comfortable in the male camaraderies of English life, partly because he had not shared the public school and university experiences of his contemporaries. When Disraeli was baptized at the age of twelve he was transferred from a small boarding school at Blackheath to Higham Hall, another small boarding establishment of fifty or sixty boys in Epping Forest, run by a Unitarian minister. Passages in his novels suggest that he was bullied, probably because of his exotic, Jewish appearance. He took boxing lessons so that he could fight back. After two or three years, at the age of about fifteen, his formal schooling came to an end and he spent the next year or two educating himself in his father's library. Disraeli was never a scholar or seeker after truth for its own sake. For him education was a process of self-realization. Its purpose was to allow his genius to shine in its full splendour. Disraeli read widely and avidly. 'I was always a bad learner and although I loved knowledge from my cradle I liked to acquire it in my own way. I think I was born with a detestation of grammars.'6 His intelligence and sensitivity enabled him to absorb a great deal, almost subliminally. He knew the classics well enough to survive in the company of colleagues and adversaries like Derby and Gladstone, who were classical scholars of a standing he could not match. Isaac D'Israeli's spiritual home in literature was the Augustan age, Pope his favourite poet, but romanticism had not passed him by. Authors like Southey and Tom Moore were friends, Byron a hero. All this rubbed off on Benjamin. Southey's romantic conservatism and aversion from industrial society was an obvious influence.7 Goethe's Werther, the archetypal tragic hero of the romantic age, left a deep mark. Disraeli probably read Wilhelm Meister, the prototype of the Bildungsroman describing the gradual self-realization of a personality, when he was writing Vivian Grey, the first of his own semi-autobiographical novels.

Genius and man about town 1804-1 83 7

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Byron was even more influential with Disraeli, as with so many. Byronic theatricality, heroism and sarcasm, as in Childe Harold or DonJuan, were fully absorbed by the young Benjamin. Intense preoccupation with self, with one’s emotions, perceptions, ambitions, these traits of romanticism became second nature to him. Disraeli was not, like Byron, ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’, nor had he made, like Goethe’s Faust, a pact with the devil, but Byronic posing and Faustian defiance figured in his repertoire. Shortly before his seventeenth birthday the young Disraeli was apprenticed to a leading firm of London solicitors. This could have been the beginning of a conventional ascent into high politics, but with Disraeli such a scenario seems implausible. From an early age he was too enamoured of his own genius, too impatient to see it universally recognized, to plod along any orthodox route. For a long time literary fame must have seemed to him the most obvious way to attract the acclaim he craved. By any but the standards of real genius his literary-journalistic successes at an early age were remarkable, but it took him a long time to recognize that he was not a poetic genius of the first order. Passages in his early novels, as well as entries in the ‘Mutilated Diary’ he kept in the 1830s, show that he at times he saw himself rising to the top not through literary achievement but through the exercise of power, that he could be ‘truly great’ only in action.* In such a frame of mind it is surprising that he managed to stick it out for two and a half years at Messrs Swain, Stevens, Maples, Pearce & Hunt. During this time a marriage to the daughter of one of the partners, Maples, was mooted by the two families. Wider and more appealing horizons beckoned when he was allowed to be present at the famous literary dinners of the publisher John Murray, second of the dynasty, a friend of his father. Murray published Byron and many other famous names. The trust that a man of Murray’s distinction put in Disraeli when he was scarcely more than a boy is truly astonishing. Murray became involved in major public and financial disasters, not least because he allowed himself to be persuaded by the young Benjamin. There was something of the manic depressive about the young Disraeli, violent mood swings from reckless optimism to bouts of depression close to breakdown. Stock market speculation of a feverish kind had irresistible appeal to him and offered a way of attaining the top rung of fame and fortune in

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one giant leap. South American mining shares enjoyed a shortlived and deceptive boom in the wake of Canning’s recognition of the new republics. Disraeli wrote pamphlets for Murray extolling the prospect of South American mines. When the crash came it injured Murray, but was disastrous for his protigi. It saddled Disraeli with debts which threatened him with disgrace throughout his early life and remained troublesome after his marriage to the wealthy Mrs Wyndham Lewis in 1839. He turned them into stimulants and spurs to action. In Tancred he puts into the mouth of one of his characters the words: ‘The two greatest stimulants in the world, Youth and Debts! What should I be without my debts, dear companions of my life that never desert me. . . .’9 He always remained incompetent with money and disdainful of it. It was even more astonishing that Disraeli, aged barely twenty, acted as intermediary in Murray’s attempt to launch a newspaper to rival The Times, to be called The Representative. Disraeli travelled north to secure J.G. Lockhart, the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott, as manager for the newspaper. What survives of this affair shows Disraeli already displaying characteristics that became a hallmark for him: love of intrigue, mystification, optimistic forecasts that would do credit to the most plausible of con-men. The Representative failed rapidly and abysmally. Disraeli had flown high and crashed badly. Soon there was another bout of exhilaration followed by despair. In 1826 he embarked on his first major literary venture, the novel Vivian Grey. Its genesis shows many traits characteristic of Disraeli as a writer. There is the craving for immediate success, stimulated by the need for money, and the great speed of production. ‘My thoughts, my passion, the rush of my invention, were too quick for my pen.’”J Creativity thus motivated and exercised can easily be devoid of lasting artistic worth, but not necessarily. Disraeli did not have the overriding genius that might have made such mundane considerations irrelevant. Yet one must admire the sheer verve and audacity and the powerful imagination that went into Vivian Grey. ‘Silver-fork’ novels depicting high society, brittle and corrupt, were suddenly in vogue and Disraeli’s attempt to cash in on the fashion was no mean feat. He achieved considerable realism in describing a society of which he had no first-hand knowledge, though he was to acquire it later. There were vivid set pieces, but poor plotting and many loose ends. Initially Vivian Grey had a dazzling success, but soon it turned into humiliating failure. Published anonymously and ‘puffed’ by

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the publisher Henry Colburn, its success owed much to speculation about the identity of its characters. Fashionable society was intrigued who the author might be and whom he was portraying. When it emerged that the author was 'a bumptious Jewboy' who had never been near high society and had made it all up, those who had been taken in, including the critics, rounded on him with venom. John Murray, who saw himself portrayed as the Marquess of Carabas, always reaching for the bottle, became even more embittered. In Contarini Fleming the hero, like Disraeli, has a succès de scandal with an anonymously published novel and is deluged with abuse when his cover is blown: With what horror, with what blank despair, with what supreme, appalling astonishment, did I find myself, for the first time in my life, a subject of the most reckless, the most malignant, and the most adroit ridicule. I was sacrificed, I was scalped. ... The criticism fell from my hand. A film floated over my vision; my knees trembled. I felt that sickness of heart, that we experience in our first scrape. I was ridiculous. It was time to die.11 Disraeli experienced a kind of death. He went on a continental tour with the Austens, a London solicitor and his wife, friends of the family. Benjamin Austen lent Disraeli money, Sara, his wife, had formed an emotional relationship with him and helped him in his writing. Through her he had got Vivian Grey published while maintaining his anonymity. She was one of many older women with whom Disraeli had romantic, sometimes physical, sometimes platonic relationships. The Austens were financially and emotionally very useful to Disraeli for many years, but when he had bigger fish to fry by the 1830s he tossed them away like a sucked orange. They reminded him too much of his raffish years. Sara was the aunt of Henry Layard, who excavated Nineveh and served Disraeli as ambassador at Constantinople at the height of the Eastern Crisis of the 1870s. In 1826, while travelling with the Austens, Disraeli was rowed on Lake Geneva at night by Maurice, Byron's famous boatman. One night on the lake there was a storm, as in Childe Harold. During his further travels in northern Italy Disraeli passed near Cento and stayed in Venice. He appears to have taken no interest in the connections of his family with these places. He was evidently not yet obsessed with his origins.

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On his return Benjamin was able to write the second, much inferior part of Vivian Grey, but then he collapsed. From 1827 to 1830 there is a gap in his life, when he did little, and suffered what would later be called a nervous breakdown.12 The Disraeli family moved around in search of health and finally settled at Bradenham, a fine manor house in Buckinghamshire. Isaac became a country gentleman, in so far as that was possible for an elderly London literary man who did not hunt or shoot, and only rented his house. Disraeli was proud of his life-long connection with the county, his membership of the magistracy and eventually his service as a county member of parliament and Bucks landowner in his own right. When, thirty years later, a county family who had always distanced themselves from the Disraelis asked him for a favour it gave him much satisfaction. During this period of prostration Disraeli produced a minor novel The Voyage of Captain Popanilla, a satire in the manner of Swift or Voltaire, set in fantastical Indian Ocean islands, Fantaisie and Vraibleusia. We get an insight into the author's political mentality, already set in a mould that was not to change greatly. His Toryism appears most obviously in his contempt for 'philosophical' politics, for ideology, dogma and blueprint. In Popanilla the Utilitarians are the particular target of his mockery. But there is also much ridicule at the expense of the established order, the corn laws, the colonial system, the Duke of Wellington, the aristocracy, the agricultural interest, many things he was later to defend. Disraeli the romantic had a temperamental aversion from the classes 'that smelt of the counting house', a remark later attached to Peel. He had an instinctive sympathy for 'the people', whoever they might exactly be and however little he knew of them. Like most romantics he was an anti-establishment rebel. Yet nothing was more seductive for him than the glitter and glamour of high society. Elements that in a less imaginative mind might have seemed incompatible were fused by him into a distinctive pose that accompanied him all his life. Disraeli wrote Popanilla when his health seemed temporarily improved early in 1828. In a letter to Sharon Turner he reported that he was 'slowly recovering from one of those tremendous disorganisations which happen to all men at some period of their lives. ... Whether I shall ever do anything which may mark me out from the crowd, I know not. I am one of those to whom moderate reputation can give no pleasure, and who in all probability am incapable of achieving a great one.'13 It was a

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disorganization that perhaps Disraeli was half in love with, that fascinated him and that any romantic hero worth his salt had to undergo. By 1829 he was sufficiently recovered to contemplate escape, from the parental roof, from England, from his creditors, by prolonged travel. Isaac would not finance a grand tour around the Mediterranean and Levant, because he still feared for his son’s health. He was never told the full extent of Benjamin’s debts. So there had to be another swift foray into literature, The Young Duke, with the subtitle ‘A Moral Tale, Though Gay’, taken from Byron’s Don Juan. Disraeli was frankly hacking, but again he writes with vivacity, wit, sarcasm, sometimes painfully convoluted. Edward Lytton Bulwer, who became friendly with Disraeli at this time, thought it contained too many ‘flippancies’. Bulwer was a figure very similar to Disraeli, foppish, affected, who had made his name with a novel Pelham, influenced by Vivian Grey. The story of The Young Duke, a young man at war with a corrupt society, has autobiographical overtones: ‘Where are now my deeds and aspirations, and where the fame I dreamed of when a boy? I find the world just slipping through my fingers.. . . My life has been a blunder and a blank, and all ends by my adding one more slight ghost to the shadowy reality of fatal precocity. .. .’I4 Disraeli’s Near Eastern tour, which lasted from May 1830 to October 1831, came therefore at an important stage in his development, when he was bogged down in doubts about his future, his health and his career. His letters home, especially to his sister Sarah, provide a lively, if egocentric record of the journey. Sarah was his confidante and took the place in his life which his mother had failed to take. His letters were meant to be kept and passages from them were recycled in his novels. Sarah’s fianci, William Meredith, was Benjamin’s companion until his death of smallpox in July 1831, when the travellers were in Cairo. Breaking the news to his sister, who remained a spinster for the rest of her life, was a heart-rending task for Benjamin. There was never again any question of marriage for her and henceforth her emotional energies were entirely concentrated on her brother. In Malta James Clay, who had been at Winchester with Disraeli’s brother Ralph, became a companion. He was a wealthy and dissipated young man of whom the Disraeli family did not approve. He hired a yacht on which the party travelled from September 1830. Clay became a Radical MP and was a

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generation later to give Disraeli valuable assistance in the passage of the second reform bill. Disraeli's outlandish dress and behaviour caused amusement as well as animosity among the British residents in Gibraltar and Malta. The officers in the garrison mess clearly thought him an intolerable coxcomb. In Albania and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire Disraeli found the Turkish way of life to his liking. When they reached Yanina in Albania and he was received by the Turkish Grand Vizier he wrote home of his 'delight at being made much of by a man who was daily decapitating half the province'. Even as a young man Disraeli was immune to the revulsion which British Nonconformists, evangelicals and liberals experienced when confronted by Turkish atrocities in the Balkans. He admired power and Realpolitik. A highlight of the journey was the visit to Jerusalem, the cradle of his race, as he came to see it, an experience to which he recurs frequently in his writings. 'Except Athens I never saw anything more essentially striking; no city except that, whose site was so pre-eminently impressive. ... ,'15 Jerusalem was at this time a sleazy backwater in a Turkish vilayet. There was also plenty of 'debauch' on this journey. In a later letter from Clay to Disraeli there is talk of 'all the thorns with which (as Mr Dickens, the Winchester Porter, was wont to observe) Venus guards her roses' and of Mercury succeeding to Venus. If Sir Philip Rose, later Disraeli's lawyer and executor, had not weeded his papers after his death and in the heyday of Victorian rectitude, we might know more about this. When back in England Disraeli had to have a course of mercury treatment. Disraeli had gained maturity and self-knowledge on his return from the great adventure, but the future was no clearer. He still wanted to be a literary lion like Byron and had not given up hope of becoming one. He might have preferred to be a Napoleon, but it required a revolution to open the way for the Corsican. Egocentricity, even narcissism, often goes with genius, but Disraeli must have had doubts if he was a genius or merely the moderate talent he scorned. Fictionalized autobiography, as in almost everything he had written up to now, was a form of selfdevelopment. It was a way of testing the potential of his own personality without too much commitment. Irony pervaded his style, another means of keeping a distance from what he had written about himself. He was often introspective, but could not really gauge how his attention-seeking, self-advertising personality struck others. There was something very modern or

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even postmodern about his preoccupation with image, his belief that rhetoric and words could construct and deconstruct reality, his courting of publicity and celebrity at all costs. Life was a game and he would play it to the full. These qualities were to make him something of an anachronism in an age when so much energy went into distinguishing good from evil and seeking the salvation of the soul. Fortunately for Disraeli the age of Victorian respectability and solidity had not yet quite arrived nor is the spirit of any age ever all-pervasive. These years of drift and dalliance did, however, present a problem for those who half a century later turned him into an icon. They found it even more difficult to deal with the evidence, impossible to suppress, that his party allegiance was initially uncertain and shifting. Modern historiography has clarified much about the nature of party labels at this period and the uncertainty and confusion surrounding them. Taken together with the way we now see Disraeli's personality, his scatter-gun and flippant early forays into politics no longer need to be explained away. While still travelling he had probably started to sketch the two books he published in 1832 and 1833, Contarini Fleming and Alroy. The former is now of interest because of the many autobiographical clues it contains. It was not the commercial success Disraeli expected and needed. Again there is only a sketchy plot, brought to an abrupt and unsatisfactory conclusion. The novel is padded out with travelogue, often recycled from the letters Disraeli sent home from his Eastern and earlier tours. The Wondrous Tale of Alroy is written in a kind of poetic prose, of which Disraeli had high expectations. William Maginn, whom Disraeli had recruited as Paris correspondent of the ill-fated Representative and who was now editor of Fraser's Magazine, parodied it thus: 'O reader dear! do pray look here, and you will spy the curly hair and forehead fair, and nose so high and gleaming eye of Benjamin Dis-ra-e-li, the wondrous boy who wrote Alroy, in rhyme and prose, only to show, how long ago victorious Judah's lion-banner rose.'16 Alroy was slightly more of a success than Contarini Fleming, perhaps because there was much sensual, sexual language, daring for its day. Women readers probably enjoyed the seduction of the hero by the sensual Princess Schirene, the beautiful daughter of the caliph, who lures him to his doom. Alroy was Disraeli's first novel with a strong Jewish theme. It drew attention to his Jewishness when he was still best known as the confidence trickster who had written

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Vivian Grey. On the other hand he was also 'Disraeli the Younger', thus styled on the title pages of some of his publications, and the elder Disraeli was an eminently respectable and respected man of letters. Isaac was about to receive an honorary degree from the University of Oxford, the only degree open to him as a non-Anglican. Shortly after Benjamin had published Alroy, Isaac brought out The Genius of Judaism. It was an elaboration of his view that the Judaism of dietary laws and other practices had had its day, but that there was much about the Talmud and other Jewish traditions that was beautiful and a worthy contribution to the religious mainstream. It would be the fate of Judaism to merge in that mainstream of enlightened Christianity. A similar conception was to emerge from much of Benjamin's later writings. Temperamentally he was, however, almost the antithesis of Isaac. Where the father was retiring and emollient, the son was fiercely controversial and parried every assault by attack. The Near Eastern journey had bolstered Benjamin's pride of race and his determination to present a bold front to every anti-Jewish attack on him. In Alroy the hero's downfall begins when he allows himself to be seduced from his ancestral faith by the blandishments of Babylon. When in meeting his death Alroy reasserts his faith he recovers his dignity. In Contarini Fleming and Alroy and in much of his later work Disraeli writes under the influence of orientalism, a broad and varied strand in the European literature of his time. For him the Hebrews are part of a 'semitic' race, for which he also uses terms like Bedouin or Arab, to whom a special religious mission is entrusted.17 Benjamin was trying to get into parliament. The attraction of the parliamentary stage had long appealed to his histrionic nature and he noted in the 'Mutilated Diary': 'I could rule the House of Commons altho' there would be a great prejudice against me at first. It is the most jealous assembly in the world. ... The character of our English society, the consequence of our aristocratic institutions renders a career difficult.' Edward Lytton Bulwer had been elected for the close Cornish borough of St Ives in 1831 and his example spurred Benjamin on. Bulwer was at this time a close friend and soul-mate, his house a focal point of Disraeli's blossoming social life. He tried to enlist Whig support for his friend, but without success. He got Joseph Hume, the leading Radical, to write a letter of support for him at High Wycombe, under the mistaken impression that it was Wendover

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and that he was not opposing any Whig. Altogether Disraeli fought High Wycombe, which could be regarded as his local seat, unsuccessfully three times: first at a by-election in June 1832, when the electorate numbered only about thirty, and then in the two general elections of December 1832 and January 1835, when the electorate had been enlarged to several hundred. Disraeli learnt to enjoy the ‘Eatanswill’ aspect of such elections and to ride the torrent of abuse, ridicule and laughter that met him, the cries of ‘Judas’, ‘old clothes’ and ‘bring a bit of pork for the Jew’. His account, to Sara Austen, of himself at the first High Wycombe election is often quoted: ‘I jumped up on the Portico of the Red Lion and gave it them for an hour and %.I can give you no idea of the effect. I made them all mad. A great many absolutely cried. I never made so many friends in my life and converted so many enemies. All the women are on my side. . ..’I* In the two elections of 1832 he stood as a Radical. He declared his support for reform, and for such clearly radical causes of the moment as the ballot, triennial parliaments and the repeal of taxes on knowledge. In March 1833, when there was the prospect of a contest at Marylebone, he issued an address as a Radical, in favour of ‘that great system of amelioration which all honest men must desire’, but against ‘a body of men who, after having obtained power by advancing the principles of liberty, have pledged themselves to a violation of the Constitution’.*9 He withdrew, but came forward again when there was threat of a petition a month later. He issued a pamphlet What is He?, perhaps in response to the question of where he stood. A journal responded for him: ‘On my head’. In the pamphlet he declared that the aristocratic principle had been destroyed by the way the Reform Bill (1832) had been imposed on the House of Lords. Therefore the Tories had a duty ‘to coalesce with the Radicals, and permit both political nicknames to merge in the common, the intelligible, and the dignified title of a National Party’.*O He was certainly anti-Whig but there was, after all, less future in Toryism at this moment than at any other time in the nineteenth century. The Tories were badly split and routed in the long reform battle, and were reduced to a rump in December 1832. Therefore he was vaguely sketching a Tory-Radical position, something that henceforth remained his own peculiar trademark. Disraeli’s immediate political future remained unclear. What he disliked was more obvious than what he supported. He could not abide the dissenting shopocracy formed up behind the Whigs.

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The Utilitarians with their absurd happiness calculus were abhorrent. 'The Utilitarians in Politics are like the Unitarians in Religion. Both omit Imagination in their systems, and Imagination governs Mankind.'21 Ancient institutions and a splendid aristocracy, for short 'the territorial constitution', excited his imagination. He was under no great presssure to make a connection between free-floating ideas and practical politics. On top of his literary output he had gone public, in April 1832, with a long pamphlet called England and France; or A Cure for Ministerial Gallomania. It was a violent diatribe against the friendly policy pursued by Palmerston and the Whig government towards the Orleanist regime brought to power in Paris by the revolution of July 1830. The pamphlet was written in collaboration with a Baron d'Haber, a German-Jewish banker with links to the overturned regime of Charles X. International intrigue and conspiracy had an irresistible appeal for Disraeli and he always much overrated their significance. At this stage his selfimportance was buoyed by such contacts and he could believe himself in the centre of events when he was really on the margins. His hope for financial gain from such activities sprang eternal. The ambivalence of his feelings about revolution comes across in Gallomania. The romantic hero at odds with the world had to sympathize with revolution, but here he sees revolutionary conspirators behind every bush like the most bigoted of reactionaries. Contrary to the thrust of Gallomania, support for a good understanding with France became one of the more consistent of his attitudes. At this moment the distinctly Tory tone of the pamphlet cast doubt on his Radical credentials at High Wycombe. If he was a Radical at this stage it was certainly not in the sense of the Philosophical Radicals like the elder Mill or Bentham, but perhaps akin to an aristocratic rebel like Sir Francis Burdett. In any case his opponents at High Wycombe were Whigs. One of them was Colonel Grey, younger son of the prime minister. Therefore Disraeli could hope for support from Tories. In the December election he was invoking the names of Bolingbroke and Sir William Wyndham, the Tory leaders of the early eighteenth century, while claiming consistency of principle for himself. He was beginning to proclaim the highly idiosyncratic view of English history that is fully elaborated in Coningsby and Sybil. A Whig oligarchy had imposed a 'Venetian' system, reduced the monarch to a doge, operated a 'Dutch' system of finance based on the national debt, and had finally

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supported a French revolution. It was a conception born during the many hours Benjamin had spent in his father's library and was influenced by Isaac's work rehabilitating the reputation of Charles I. But the political ideas of Benjamin at the age of twentyseven were uncertain and fluid. If life was a game, then politics even more so. It was not easy for a romantic hero of Byronic or Napoleonic proportions to bring himself down to the mundane level of parliamentary factionalism. There is the frequently quoted passage from The Young Duke, cut in the 1853 edition: 'I must be consistent, and not compromise my principles, which will never do in England - more than once a year. Let me see: what are they? Am I a Whig or a Tory? I forget. ... I feel like Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy. I think I will be a Whig and a Tory alternate nights. . . . ' 2 2 Underneath this typically Disraelian piece of flippancy there is a Machiavellian faith in fortuna, who makes and breaks the great man pitting his virtu against her slings and arrows. There was a touch of the Renaissance condottiere about him. When the fate of the Reform Bill was in doubt in 1832 he wrote to his sister: 'I care very little, what ever may be the result, as, under all circumstances I hope to float uppermost.'23 Disraeli's uncertain steps into the political arena were accompanied and sometimes helped by his progress in society. One of his entry points was Bulwer, a true partner in crime. 'Bulwer is one of the few with whom my intellect comes into collision with benefit. He is full of thought and views at once original and just.' Bulwer was locked into a disastrous marriage with Rosina, who came from a raffish Irish background. She regarded Disraeli as a bad influence on her husband and many years later lampooned him in a novel of her own as Mr Jericho Jabber, a 'Jew-d'ésprit'. At the Bulwers' he first met his future wife, then Mrs Wyndham Lewis, 'a pretty little woman ... a flirt and a rattle'. When Rosina Bulwer asked him to take her in to dinner he said: 'Oh anything rather than that insufferable woman, but Allah is great', and with his characteristic mannerism of putting his thumbs into the armholes of his fancy waistcoat he moved towards her.24 Another early focus of Disraeli's social climbing was the house of Dr George Bolton and his wife Clara. Clara used her sexual charms to widen the couple's social circle and Benjamin later called her 'a decoy duck',25 but now she became his mistress. Probably the most significant arena for Disraeli's social conquests was the

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Blessington house in Seamore Place. Alfred, Comte D'Orsay, more stylish and more self-assured than Disraeli as a dandy, had been living with Marguerite, Countess of Blessington, in a notorious ménage á trois until the death of her eccentric husband in 1829. Marguerite had, like Disraeli, to keep the wolf from the door by writing, but it was a labour of Sisyphus, given her own and even more D'Orsay's extravagance. Lady Blessington was a 'blue' hostess, for her famously furnished salons were avoided by those of the highest social standing, especially women. Her and D'Orsay's exquisite taste made their parties 'the only attempt at a republic of letters in the world of this great, envious & gifted metropolis'.26 Benjamin's great love of the years from 1833 to 1836 was Lady Henrietta Sykes, the wife of Sir Francis Sykes, a baronet descended from Indian nabobs, with a fine Palladian country house, Basildon Park, and a London house in Upper Grosvenor Street. Henrietta had married Sir Francis in 1821 and had four children by him. Although even the relationship with Henrietta turned out to have its political uses, it was a genuine affair of the heart and engaged Disraeli with the passion worthy of a romantic hero. He probably had Henrietta Sykes in mind when he wrote in Henrietta Temple: There was a playful grace about Henrietta Temple, a wild and brilliant simplicity, which was more charming because it was blended with peculiarly high breeding. No person in ordinary society was more calm, or enjoyed a more complete self-possession, yet no one in the more intimate relations of life indulged more in those little unstudied bursts of nature, which seemed almost to remind one of the playful child rather than the polished woman; and which, under such circumstances, are infinitely captivating.27 Henrietta's possessiveness may have irked him at times and even this grand amour could only intermittently crowd out his self-obsession and inordinate ambition. But when late in 1836 Henrietta finally left him for the painter Daniel Maclise he felt deeply downcast. He wrote to the Comte D'Orsay, at that time perhaps his closest friend: 'perhaps I ought to congratulate myself that an intimacy which must have, I suppose, sooner or later concluded, has terminated in a manner which may cost my heart a pang but certainly not my conscience. But it is in vain to reason with those who feel. In calmer moments I may be of your

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opinion; at present I am wretched.'28 Underneath the mask of supercilious sarcasm and affectation, Disraeli was vulnerable, sensitive and insecure. Disraeli moved mainly at the raffish margins of society, but he did come into contact with leading politicians. To his sister he described how he sat next to Sir Robert Peel at a dinner party in May 1832: 'I can easily conceive that he could be very disagreeable but yesterday he was a in a most condescending mood and unbent with becoming haughtiness. I reminded him by my dignified familiarity both that he was ex-Minister and I a present radical.' An account of this meeting given by the host, the 3rd Earl of St Germans, many years later has a greater ring of truth: 'From his appearance or manner Sir Robert Peel seemed to take an intuitive dislike to him. He "buried his chin in his neckcloth" and did not speak a word to Disraeli during the rest of the meal.'29 Peel, who had wielded great power and patronage as chief secretary for Ireland from the age of twenty-four, had developed the skill of freezing out importunate and unwelcome strangers to a fine art. It went well with his shyness and social insecurity. Another meeting with a leading political figure, Lord Melbourne, in the summer of 1834 has often been described. Melbourne was home secretary at the time and was soon to become prime minister. Disraeli met him chez Mrs Norton, one of the three beautiful daughters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the actor-manager and playwright. An amitié amoureuse had blossomed between Disraeli and another sister, Helen Blackwood, later Lady Dufferin. Caroline Norton was married to George Norton, a brutal ruffian, who two years later brought an action for criminal conversation, in other words adultery, against Melbourne when he was prime minister. It very nearly brought his political career to an end, but he abandoned her to save himself. Her reputation was ruined and she was deprived of access to her children. It turned her into an early fighter for women's rights. But all this lay in the future. When Disraeli came upon Melbourne in Caroline Norton's small house in Storey's Gate the home secretary, twenty-five years his senior, asked him: 'Well now, tell me what you want to be.' To Melbourne's surprise the young man said he wanted to be prime minister. According to Disraeli's account many years later, Melbourne said: 'No chance of that in our time. It is all arranged and settled. Nobody can compete with Stanley ... if you are careful how you steer, no

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doubt you will get into some port at last. But you must put all these foolish notions out of your head; they won't do at all. Stanley will be the next prime minister, you will see.'30 Stanley, as the 14th Earl of Derby, did become prime minister and Disraeli was his principal lieutenant and eventual successor. The most important political link that Disraeli formed in these years was with Lord Lyndhurst, the Lord Chancellor in all Tory governments from Canning in 1827 to Peel in 1846. Disraeli met Lyndhurst at Henrietta's dinner table in July 1834. The two men were birds of a feather, even though separated by an age gap of more than thirty-two years. Lyndhurst was the son of an American painter and therefore an outsider in the British ruling class, like Disraeli, but he had risen through the more conventional route of the law. He had an entrenched reputation as a turncoat. He was regarded as having once been a Radical and republican. Then as a Tory and member of Canning's cabinet he opposed Catholic emancipation but remained in the government when it became Wellington's policy. After Wellington's fall he accepted the appointment of chief baron of the Exchequer from Lord Grey, who was seriously enamoured of Lady Lyndhurst. She had always picked her lovers to advance her husband's career and he was himself a notorious womanizer. Not being born into wealth, Lyndhurst needed his official salary, no less than £14,000 a year for the Lord Chancellor, with a pension of £4000. Therefore he clung to office, but this, and being a lawyer, made him into an adept practitioner of the politics of opportunism.31 When Disraeli first met him in July 1834 Lyndhurst had recently been widowed. This was the moment when the Whig government of Lord Grey, which had once seemed so impregnable, was tottering. Grey resigned in July 1834 and was succeeded by Melbourne. By November Melbourne was 'dismissed' by William IV, the last occasion when a monarch was able to take such a step. Since Peel was in Italy at the time and it took three weeks to get him back, the government was during the interval in the hands of the Duke of Wellington and of Lyndhurst, who resumed the Great Seal. As a result of his growing friendship with Lyndhurst, Disraeli was on the fringes of these great events. In the days before Melbourne's dismissal he was involved in a negotiation with Lord Chandos, a leader of the agricultural interest, designed to put the government in a minority. These intrigues, enjoyable as they were for Disraeli, were swiftly overtaken by events. Even the interest of Lyndhurst did not suffice to

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secure him a winnable seat in the December general election. Earlier in the year he had still maintained his independent stance and had tried to secure a seat through Lord Durham, Grey's sonin-law, who stood furthest to the left in the Whig connection. Greville wrote in his diary on 6 December 1834: 'His political principles m u s t . . . be in abeyance, for he said that Durham was doing all he could to get him by the offer of a seat, and so forth; if, therefore, he is undecided and wavering between Chandos and Durham, he must be a mighty impartial personage. I don't think such a man will do, though just such as Lyndhurst would be connected with.'32 So there was nothing for it but to fight High Wycombe for a third time, but this time he got a contribution of £500 from Tory party funds. He came bottom of the poll. He still had his other irons in the fire, the affair with Henrietta, his hectic social climbing, and his literary ambitions. All this was accompanied by the often desperate battle to keep his creditors at bay and raise more money. Disraeli had to a remarkable extent the gift to compartmentalize himself. Defeats in one quarter did not interfere with triumphs in another. He still thought he could be a major poet and had embarked, in 1833, upon an ambitious poetic project in the Byronic mould, The Revolutionary Epick. In it the feudal genius, aristocracy, does battle with the federal genius, democracy. 'The conception seems to me sublime. It all depends on the execution,' he told Sara Austen, from whose husband he was still trying to wheedle money.33 Sara's nephew Henry Layard recalled years later the scene when Disraeli read the completed part of the poem in January 1834 at a dinner given by the Austens: Standing with his back to the fire, he proceeded in his usual grandiloquent style and with his usual solemn gesture to ask why, as the heroic age had produced its Homer, the Augustan era its Virgil, the Renaissance its Dante, the Reformation its Milton, should not the Revolutionary Epoch, in which we live, produce its representative Poet. There was something irresistibly comic in the young man dressed in the fantastic, coxcombical costume he then affected ... announcing himself as the Homer or Dante of his age!34 The Revolutionary Epick was neither a critical nor a financial success and in the preface the author had promised 'to hurl his Lyre, without a pang, into limbo' if it did not receive the acclaim

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he felt it deserved, but he continued to regard The Revolutionary Epick as one of his more significant creations. He had also embarked upon a joint novel with his sister, A Year at Hartlebury or The Election, which has only recently come to light. His antics, especially the affair with Henrietta, caused much anxiety at Bradenham and Sarah was the filter through which they came to the ears of his parents. She nursed literary ambitions of her own and through the collaboration on Hartlebury he sought to help her. Much of it was based on his own experience of politics and electioneering and can therefore be seen as his first attempt at a political novel. The hero, Bohun, is fiercely anti-Whig and wants to form a 'National Party' to oppose the Whigs and their hangers-on 'the Sectarian Low Whig Oligarchy', who control many of the boroughs.35 Hartlebury was published in March 1834. In 1835 the general political situation, still fluid after the constitutional revolution of the Reform Bill (1832), reached a defining moment. The government formed by Peel when he returned from Italy could not maintain itself in office. It had gained around a hundred seats in the general election in which Disraeli had failed to win High Wycombe for the third time, but it was not enough. In April 1835 Peel was voted out by a coalition of Whigs, Radicals and the followers of O'Connell, the Irish Repealer. This coalition was formed at a meeting at Lichfield House, one of the great Whig houses in London, and became known as the Lichfield House Compact. This entirely ad hoc agreement can be seen as the beginning of the nineteenthcentury Liberal party. Melbourne came back again and no subsequent monarch has attempted to dismiss a minister. There was also now a clearer party situation in the House of Commons. The Lichfield House coalition was the government and the reinvigorated Tory party was the opposition. Disraeli, aged thirty, was intensely involved in these events. After the fall of Peel it was by no means certain how secure the government would be that Melbourne had formed on the basis of the Lichfield House agreement. Many Whigs disliked the association with the Radicals and even more with O'Connell. Disraeli acted as an intermediary, through Mrs Norton, between Lyndhurst and Melbourne to explore a coalition in which Disraeli's patron would remain Lord Chancellor. It was no more than a fleeting episode on the sidelines, but it was heady stuff for a young man. One can still feel Disraeli's excitement brimming

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over as he writes about it to his father.36 The formation of Melbourne's government produced a crop of by-elections. Newly appointed ministers had to vacate their seats when they took up an office of profit under the crown and seek re-election, but often they were unopposed. Lyndhurst was instrumental in obtaining a contest for Disraeli at Taunton. He now stood in his fourth electoral battle unequivocally as a Tory. In rebutting the accusation that he was an adventurer who had sought to get into parliament on any available label he emphasized his consistent opposition to Whiggery. The justification he gave for his various changes of front does not now seem too far-fetched. But again he lost. A by-product of the Taunton election was a clash between Disraeli and O'Connell, which became famous. The alliance between the Whigs and the Irish Liberator was the most obvious target for Tory attacks. Violent and extravagant invective was the common currency of politics and Disraeli was not backward in using it. He was reported as having called the compact with the Irish an alliance with a traitor. O'Connell replied with an even more colourful diatribe, in which he referred to Disraeli's change of opinions, called him a living lie and said that the British Empire was degraded by tolerating 'a miscreant of his abominable description'. Alluding to his Jewish origins he compared him to 'the impenitent thief on the Cross'. Disraeli issued a challenge, but since O'Connell did not fight duels it was transferred to his son. There were more vituperative letters in the newspapers, but the matter was finally ended by police action to keep the peace. Disraeli thought he had done well - 'I have squabashed them,' he wrote to his sister.37 It certainly gained him notoriety and this he much preferred to obscurity. Politically Disraeli was now moving in Lyndhurst's slipstream and for the next two years was his informal private secretary and amanuensis. Henrietta had done her best to advance his cause with Lyndhurst by becoming the mistress of the older man. 'I can make him do as I like so whatever arrangement you think best tell me and I will perform it ...,' she wrote to Benjamin. 'He is a perfect fool where women are concerned.'38 When Henrietta acompanied Lyndhurst on a visit to Benjamin at Bradenham in July 1835, it set tongues wagging in county society and the scandal was still remembered after Disraeli's death. Lyndhurst was about to embark upon a major political battle and his young acolyte threw himself life and soul into his

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master's fight. The English Municipal Corporations Bill was passing through parliament. It was one of the major Whig reforms and was scarcely less important in shaping the country's political framework than the Reform Bill three years before. The boroughs would more than ever become a stronghold of that middle class, often Nonconformist, that was so little to Disraeli's taste. In the Commons Peel had accepted the bill in principle. He was following the policy enunciated in the Tamworth Manifesto of supporting moderate reform and avoiding factious opposition. In the Lords Lyndhurst fought hard against the Municipal Corporations Bill, while Peel ostentatiously kept his distance. A number of amendments not acceptable to the government were passed. There were rumours that Melbourne would be forced to resign and that Lyndhurst would become prime minister. Disraeli was in a fever of excitement and was sure he would soon have a seat in the Commons. The state of affairs is marvellous. Melbourne seems completely deserted by his party,' he wrote to his sister. He published a number of articles in the Morning Post, replete with praise for Lyndhurst and virulent abuse of his opponents. He wrote to Sarah: 'I have sent you the Morning Post every day, which is the only paper now read, in whose columns some great unknown has suddenly risen, whose exploits form almost the sole staple of political conversation.'39 These articles were his first major venture into political journalism. He had also issued, when fighting the seat at Taunton, a number of letters to the electors there. These were published as pamphlets, in which he justified his own political position and rebutted once more the charge that he had changed his political colours. A sample of his arguments runs: I deny that the Tories oppose short parliaments or the ballot, because they will give too much power to the people: it is because they give too much power to the constituency; a shrewd and vast difference. The more popular the constituency, the stronger the Tories will become, but why they are now in danger is that for party purposes the power of the state has been thrown into the hands of a sectarian oligarchy, by which I do not mean the Whigs ... but the disaffected dissenting Minority who, for their own purpose, have supported the disaffected aristocratic minority, to wit, the Whigs of England.40

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Lyndhurst did not become prime minister and some of the Tory peers took fright. The ex-Lord Chancellor knew when to give way and the Municipal Corporations Bill passed, with some amendments. Lyndhurst was not really an ultra himself, for he was far too much of a pliable lawyer politician, and his differences with Peel were soon past history. He had, however, reasserted the authority of the upper chamber, damaged by capitulation over the Reform Bill. This was the background to Disraeli's publication of what is still the most extended exposition of his political views, The Vindication of the English Constitution, addressed to Lyndhurst.41 Again he argues that the Tory party is and, when it was true to itself, always has been the truly national party. He underpins this with his highly selective historical discourse, in which Bolingbroke is again amply invoked. The Whigs are 'a small knot of great families who have no other object but their own aggrandisement'. The rest of the nation - that is to say, nine tenths of the people of England formed the Tory party, the landed proprietors and peasantry of the kingdom, headed by a spiritual and popular Church ... The Tory party in this country is the national party; it is the really democratic party of England. In accordance with recent events the House of Lords is allotted a special role in safeguarding the liberties of the people. The Lords are more representative of the people, he argues, than the Commons, who merely represent the constituencies. It did not escape a good many readers that this argument, if taken to its logical conclusion, would lead to universal suffrage. Disraeli often comes close to plagiarizing Burke in putting an organicist view of state and society and pitting it against the assertion of abstract rights: Those great men, who have periodically risen to guide the helm of our government in times of tumultuous and stormy exigency, knew that a State is a complicated creation of refined art, and they handled it with all the delicacy a piece of exquisite machinery requires. They knew that, if once they admitted the abstract rights of subjects, they must inevitably advance to the abstract rights of men, and then that the very foundations of their civil polity would sink beneath them.

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He adopts the eulogistic view of English constitutional development and liberty, which had become part of the national consensus. It is a view to be found in radical as well as conservative writing and it also forms the essence of the Whig interpretation. Disraeli, clever propagandist that he is, gives it the special twist that makes the Tory party into the true champion of the people. It proved in the long run a more potent piece of imagemaking than the managerial conservatism outlined by Peel a few months earlier in the Tamworth Manifesto. Peel had taken the trouble to obtain a copy of the Vindication even before Disraeli sent him one and wrote to the author: 'I ... was gratified and surprised to find that a familiar and apparently exhausted topic could be treated with so much of original force of argument and novelty of illustration.' To his father Benjamin said he had sent Peel a copy 'late and grudgingly with a cold, dry note, convinced that he wo[ul]d never notice, or even confess to hav[in]g heard of it; being as you well know by reput[ati]on, the most jealous, frigid and haughty of men; and as I had reason to believe anything but friendly to me.'42 Disraeli's publicity campaign on behalf of Lyndhurst cannot have commended him to Peel. Neither patron nor protege can have been much to his taste, but at least the ex-Lord Chancellor was a political fixture that could not easily be removed, his follower only a disreputable freebooter. Disraeli continued to be upwardly mobile in his social life. A threshold was crossed when Frances Anne, Lady Londonderry, took him up. She was a leading Tory hostess, bolstered by vast wealth. In July 1835 he dined at Rose Bank, the Londonderrys' summer house by the Thames, 'the prettiest babyhouse in the world'. She remained a friend and even confidante for the rest of her life, but an element of servility on his part never quite left their relationship. She appears as Lady Deloraine in Sybil. Disraeli seems to have oscillated between bursts of great energy and moments of indolence, something he recognized in himself. In September 1833, when he had fallen in love with Henrietta, he wrote in his diary: My life has been a struggle, with moments of rapture - a storm with dashes of moonlight. ... With fair health I have no doubt of success, but the result will probably be fatal to my life. My disposition is now indolent. I wish to be idle, and enjoy myself, muse over the stormy past, and smile at

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the placid present. My career will probably be more energetic than ever, and the world will wonder at my ambition. Alas I struggle from Pride. Yes, it is Pride that now prompts me, not Ambition. They shall not say I have failed.43 'They' were his enemies and detractors, perhaps also some nearer home, like his Baasevi relations, who had little time for his genius and only saw the disrepute into which his scandalous liaisons and his debts were bringing him. After the excitements and disappointments of 1835, he was still struggling from pride. At the beginning of 1836 he published a series of articles in The Times, arranged with the proprietor Thomas Barnes, under the pseudonym 'Runnymede', which in a highly polemical tone repeat many of the arguments of his campaign at Taunton and of the Vindication. The most vitriolic attacks were directed against O'Connell and the Irish. When the Irish Municipal Corporations Bill was before the House of Lords in April 1836 and was being opposed by Lyndhurst Disraeli said in his Runnymede letter: It is as the great Papal nominee that this O'Connell, with all his vileness, becomes a power to control which requires no common interference. ... In a few hours, in obedience to the mandate of the Papal priesthood, that shallow voluptuary who is still Prime Minister of England will call upon your Lordships, with cuckoo note, to do 'justice to Ireland'. . .. These men cannot be conciliated. They are your foes, because they are the foes of England. They hate our free and fertile isle. ... This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain, and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their fair ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood. And now, forsooth, the cry is raised that they have been misgoverned!44 It was a moment when such anti-Irish prejudice found a ready echo, certainly among Tories. The Runnymede letters did not bring Disraeli a fee and this was a period when his debts were pressing hardest upon him. Pyne, a solicitor who acted for the Sykes family, created a complex and impenetrable 'system' for Disraeli, by which his

26

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debts were rescheduled and he could just keep his head above water. Often it was a close shave. In February 1837 he had been a Buckinghamshire magistrate for nearly a year and was campaigning in a by-election at Aylesbury. He was compelled to write to Pyne from Bradenham: 'of all things in the world pray preserve me from a Sheriffs Officer in my own county. In consequence of this affair, I shall not sleep at Aylesbury as I intended but return in the evening. .. .'45 During the Aylesbury election he collapsed and was bled, an incident which made his creditors even more insistent on the repayment of their money. He thought of his debts as an appropriate accoutrement for the well-dressed dandy and man of the world, but the habit of subterfuge, halftruths, lies, and meaningless promises was difficult to shake off and seeped into his activities as a political controversialist. With irrepressible but ill-founded optimism he got involved in schemes and intrigues which he thought would make him large sums. It is unlikely that Disraeli made any money out of any of his schemes, but to Pyne, Austen and others he always made it look as if his chickens had already hatched. Necessity drove him back to literature and he published two more novels. He completed Henrietta Temple, started two years earlier, in the autumn of 1836. Book I was written when he had fallen in love with his Henrietta, the later parts of the novel show signs of the break-up with her. Henrietta Temple was financially Disraeli's most successful book since Vivian Grey. He then rapidly wrote another, Venetia, while staying with D'Orsay and Lady Blessington in their palatial new house in Kensington Gore. Venetia, a fictionalized story of Byron, his daughter Ada, and Shelley, was less successful. More than ever a seat in the House of Commons would dissipate the sense of impasse in Disraeli's life, provide him with a new stage and save him from his creditors. He was trying to get into the good books of Peel, but in private was often critical. In the Runnymede letters he had addressed him thus: 'In your chivalry alone is our hope. Clad in the panoply of your splendid talents and your spotless character, we feel assured that you will subdue this unnatural and unnational monster [the Radical movement].' Commenting on Peel's major speech at Glasgow in January 1837, he wrote to his sister: 'as a compos[it]ion it appears to me both solemn and tawdry; he cannot soar, and his attempts to be imaginative and sentimental must be offensive to every man of taste and refined feeling.'46

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For the moment the collapse of Melbourne's government, always confidently predicted by Disraeli, failed to materialize. It was the accession of Queen Victoria that at last gave him the opportunity to obtain the long-coveted seat in the Commons. The law required that with a new sovereign there had to be a dissolution of parliament. Victoria's accession, although it enabled Disraeli to get into the House of Commons, in fact prolonged the life of the Melbourne government and gave the Whig prime minister for a time a position of unparalleled influence as the trusted mentor of the young queen. Disraeli's letters in the days after the queen's accession convey something of the cliff-hanging excitement while he was making up his mind which seat to fight. The outcome was that he would fight Maidstone alongside Wyndham Lewis, the wealthy husband of 'the rattle and flirt' he had taken into dinner years ago. She probably helped to persuade her husband to take on Disraeli as his running mate, rather than another among the many milling round the Carlton Club in search of seats. The hope of getting away without a contest at Maidstone was to be disappointed, for a Radical candidate, Colonel Perronet Thompson, one of the proprietors of the Westminster Review, entered the fray. He was known as 'the Bonaparte of Free Trade'. Disraeli, buoyed up by the influence and the money of Wyndham Lewis, won by a secure margin, Lewis getting 707 votes, Disraeli 616 and Thompson 412. Many who had previously 'plumped' for Lewis now cast their second vote for Disraeli. He was by this time an effective campaigner. Cries of 'old clothes' and 'Shylock' did not disconcert him, but he was still worried that a writ might be served on him. Attacks on the new poor law, then at the height of its unpopularity, featured in Disraeli's campaign. He did not remind the voters that when it was enacted three years earlier Peel supported it. To Sarah he wrote: 'It seems to me that all the strength and property of the Boro' are on our side, and opposition to the Poor Laws makes us popular with the multitude.'47 The idea of a Tory aristocracy uniting with the democracy was a thought to which he hardly ever failed to recur. It is tempting to see Disraeli's entry into parliament, linked, as it was about to be, with his marriage, all this coinciding with the beginning of a new reign, as a milestone in his life. However much later myth-makers might turn his ascent into a fairy tale, his achievements up to now had not been exceptional. Pitt had been prime minister at 24, Napoleon was conquering Italy at 26.

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Disraeli, the son of a well-known and affluent writer with a fine country house, was still the young man on the make, who had got himself into innumerable scrapes. It was nothing to be ashamed of in a Byronic hero, but the world in general and even his own father were not always so tolerant. D'Orsay had advised him, in an early version of franglais, to confess to his father 'l'Etendue de votre Scrape'. He warned him that his lively and brilliant imagination made him build castles in Spain. 'Tout cela est bel et bon pour les Wonderful Tales of Alroy mais pour la Matérielle vie d l'Angleterre le positif bat l'imaginaire.' Disraeli replied: 'I quite agree with you about imagination, the possession of which I deem the greatest curse that can befall a human being. However I am yet young enough to turn into a man of business and a Screw; and that will be positive enough.'48 It was through his imagination that he would make his political impact.

2 Politics and domesticity 1837-1841

Disraeli's confidence that he could one day command the House of Commons was premature. He was still the extravagantly dressed, dandified man about town making his mark by affecting a brilliant conversational style, peppered with self-consciously exaggerated sarcasms. As a political controversialist he employed the offensive hyperbole not uncommon at the time, but that was, perhaps fortunately, not taken too literally or too seriously. When sycophancy was required he could ladle it out with equal abandon. He was now accepted in Tory high society, but hardly taken at face value. Lady Salisbury, first wife of the 2nd Marquis, met him at the Londonderrys' in 1837 and wrote in her diary: 'I never met him before. He bears the mark of the Jew strongly about him, and at times his way of speaking reminded me so much of Lord Lyndhurst, I could almost have thought him in the room. He is evidently very clever, but superlatively vulgar.'1 Henrietta came briefly back to haunt him. 'During the election occurred the terrible catastrophe of Henrietta, exactly a year after we had parted,' he wrote in the Mutilated Diary. Sir Francis had discovered her affair with Maclise and threatened proceedings for criminal conversation. Disraeli might have been implicated because of an alleged payment of £2000 in excess of her allowance into his pocket. There was no court case, but Henrietta was turned out of house and home and deprived of access to her children. The following year Lyndhurst tried to bring a Custody of Infants Bill, to deal with cases like Henrietta and Caroline Norton, but it did not pass. Disraeli was delighted with his position as an MP: 'I am very well and begin to enjoy my new career. I find that it makes a

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sensible difference in the opinion of one's friends. I can scarcely keep my countenance,' he wrote to his sister on 10 August 1837.2 When the autumn session of the new parliament started Disraeli flattered himself that he now enjoyed the special favour of Peel. He was invited by the Tory leader to a House dinner: 'all our great men, with the Exception of Lord Ramsay [later Lord Dalhousie, a noted Governor-General of India] and myself, the only 2 new members. It has created some jealousy and surprise; but W[yndham] L[ewis] is delighted and says "Peel has taken him by the hand in the most marked way."'3 He kept an unusual low profile when, on 5 December 1837, there was a debate on the Municipal Officers Declaration Bill to relieve Quakers and Moravians of the need to take an oath. An instruction to the committee considering the bill to extend the relief to all religious denominations raised the question of Jewish disabilities. Ten years later Disraeli was to take a famously courageous stand on the 'Jew' question, but this time he kept his head below the parapet. He wrote to Sarah: 'listened to the debate which turned out to be the Jew Question by a sidewind. Nobody looked at me and I was not at all uncomfortable, but voted in the majority (only of 12) with the utmost sangfroid.'4 It is a glimpse into the attitude of the Disraeli family to their Jewishness, something they had to drag around like a ball and chain. Their way of dealing with the problem did not chime with Benjamin's temperament. Except on some occasions, as at this moment, his way was to turn the mark of Cain defiantly into a badge of racial superiority. There followed, on 7 December, the fiasco of his maiden speech, one of the most famous in parliamentary history. His intervention on the corruption of the Irish election results was rash in the extreme, a topic and occasion far too controversial for a maiden speech. It was typical of his habit of attracting attention and notoriety by offensive flamboyance. Since the general election of the previous July the Whigs were more than ever dependent on O'Connell and nothing more inflamed political passions than this dependence. The immediate matter under discussion was a number of Irish election petitions, which in the view of Irish members had been financed by Protestant funds. The reforms of 1829 and 1832, abolishing the 40-shilling freeholder in Ireland, had left very small electorates open to corruption. Disraeli, still extravagantly dressed and affecting the dandified manner for which he was notorious, stepped straight into a hornets' nest. He had not been on his feet for long when

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he could hardly make himself heard above the barracking from Irish and Radical members. He tried to carry on for the time he had allotted himself, but finally had to give up, bellowing the famous peroration, 'I sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me'. It was perhaps fortunate that he could not be heard, for with the heavy and involved sarcasms he was prepared to deliver he would have made an even greater fool of himself. He was conscious of failure and for once ready to admit it to his sister: 'I state at once that my debut was a failure, so far that I could not succeed in gaining an opportunity of saying what I intended; but the failure was not occasioned by my breaking down or any incompetency on my part, but from the physical powers of my adversaries. I can give you no idea how bitter, how factious, how unfair they were.'5 The unfairness of it garnered him some good will, from Peel, Chandos and others. Greville, never well disposed towards him, wrote in his diary: 'D'Israeli made his first exhibition this night, beginning with florid assurance, speedily degenerating into ludicrous absurdity, and being at last put down with inextinguishable shouts of laughter.'6 Stanley, who followed him, omitted the customary compliments. He was strongly prejudiced against the man with whom fate would later link him closely. These feelings probably went back to an episode six years earlier, when Disraeli had just returned from his travels together with Henry Stanley, Edward's younger brother. He was a spendthrift, who disappeared in London rather than admit his debts to his father. Disraeli was asked by the family to help find Henry, but Edward suspected that it was in fact Disraeli who had introduced Henry to Effie Bond, a notorious money-lender and keeper of a 'gambling hell' in St James's. Edward was riled that someone like Disraeli should know something about the dirty linen of the august Derby family. In the Runnymede letters Disraeli had dished out the praise for Stanley, but in private he reciprocated Stanley's dislike. Soon there was more mutual respect: 'He was exceedingly courteous and something more even interested,' Disraeli wrote to his sister on 20 February 1839.7 In fact Stanley was at this time acting as a brake on the Conservative party. Peel attached more importance to bringing him and Graham firmly into the Tory fold than to prematurely seizing the reigns of government from the Whigs. Disraeli at any rate soon sobered up in his approach to parliamentary tactics. Richard Lalor Sheil, a prominent Irish member, advised him to make brief and dull speeches:. 'Quote

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figures, date, calculations. And in a short time the house will sigh for the wit and eloquence, which they all know are in you; they will encourage you to pour them forth, and then you will have the ear of the house and be a favourite.'8 It was advice Disraeli was to take to heart. Not that he was really daunted. He wrote to Lady Caroline Maxse, with whom and her husband he was frequently staying or dining: 'I must be again in that brawling Pandemonium, the House of Commons. I can't say they treated me very well there, when I wished to enlighten their darkness, but I rather like a row, and never succeed in anything unless I am opposed.'9 Ten days after his maiden speech he intervened on a matter well removed from the cockpit of party in-fighting and on which he could claim to be an expert. Thomas Talfourd, a lawyer and later a judge, was trying to pass a bill to give better protection to authors' copyright. Disraeli was almost childish in his delight when reporting to his sister Talfourd's reference to 'the excellent suggestion of the honourable member for Maidstone, himself one of the greatest ornaments of our modern literature' and Peel's cheer for this remark.10 Disraeli spoke on copyright a number of times, was always well received, and suggested several amendments to the bill. He again put his sober side forward at his next more substantial intervention, on 16 March 1838, defending the corn laws. It was just two days after the sudden death of Wyndham Lewis, who had collapsed and fallen off his chair when his wife was in the room. There would now be pressure on Disraeli from the executors of the Lewis estate to settle his debts arising from the Maidstone election. Soon the matter snowballed into another scrape for Disraeli. There was a petition following the by-election caused by Wyndham Lewis's death. Disraeli was accused of promising to bribe the electors in the election of the previous July and of not having paid his debts. He counter-attacked with a letter to the Morning Post, accusing the counsel in the petition proceedings, Charles Austin, who had made these allegations, of uttering reckless falsehoods. Austin brought a libel action, but Disraeli got away with a somewhat ambiguous apology. By this time, in November 1838, his courtship of Mrs Wyndham Lewis was in full swing. While her husband was still alive, he had been on friendly, slightly flirtatious terms with her. She had had her eye on him for a long time and had written to her brother after the election: 'Mark what I prophesy - Mr Disraeli will, in a very few years be

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one of the greatest men of his day.'11 Her husband's death made her into a natural target for the many men always on the lookout for a financially rewarding match. In fact her situation was not as well-endowed as Wyndham Lewis's great wealth had led general opinion to expect. She was left a life-interest in his estate, which gave her an income of £5000 a year, and a fine house in Grosvenor Gate, on Park Lane, overlooking Hyde Park. It was not long before Disraeli saw himself as a suitor. From his point of view the need to make a suitable match was now more pressing than it had been. Another dissolution of parliament was always on the cards, given the insecure position of the Melbourne government. In fact it was what Disraeli wanted and he chafed at Peel's still cautious policy. But without Wyndham Lewis he was hardly in a position to fight Maidstone again and he would be back where he had been, exposed to his creditors. He needed a secure port and it could not go on being at Bradenham. For a young heiress, such as had sometimes been talked about in the past, he was now hardly an attractive proposition. There was about his life a certain sense of scaled-down expectations, be it in love, literature or politics, though he would not have admitted as much to himself. Mary Anne was twelve years older than himself, born in 1792, but claimed to be four years younger than she was. She came of solid Devonshire farming stock and her father had been a naval lieutenant, who died when she was two. She was connected with the Vineys, a county family, but her upbringing had been quite humble and she had little education. Her marriage, in 1815, to Wyndham Lewis, whose money came from the Dowlais ironworks in Wales, had brought her into the fashionable London world. Common sense, warmth and an appealing lack of pretension had enabled her to hold her own. The initial motivation of Disraeli's suit may well have been money, but he also wanted someone who could give him the security of unquestioning affection. There was his recurring quest for an older woman, a mother figure, willing to worship unreservedly at his shrine. He would not have been the romantic that he was, if he had not soon persuaded himself that he was in love. The letters he wrote to her sound all the notes of ecstasy and despair required by romantic love: 'I am mad with love. My passion is frenzy. The prospect of our immediate meeting overwhelms and entrances me. I pass my nights and days in scenes of strange and fascinating rapture. ... '12 For the sake of her reputation she held him off until at least a year had elapsed since

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her husband's death. His reputation would have sunk even lower if he was seen as the hired gigolo of a rich widow. In February 1839 he tried to get an immediate commitment from her, there was a quarrel about money she had advanced him in connection with the Maidstone affair, and she threw him out of her house. He wrote a long, helter-skelter letter in a desperate effort to bring her round: When I first made my advances to you I was influenced by no romantic feelings ... I myself, about to commence a practical career, wished for the solace of a home, & shrunk from all the torturing passions of intrigue. I was not blind to worldly advantages in such an alliance, but I had already proved that my heart was not to be purchased. I found you in sorrow, & that heart was touched. I found you, as I thought, aimiable, tender, & yet acute & gifted with no ordinary mind - one who I cd look upon with pride as the partner of my life, who cd sympathise with all my projects & feelings, console me in the moments of depression, share my hour of triumph, & work with me for our honor & happiness. It ended: Farewell. I will not affect to wish you happiness, for it is not in your nature to obtain it. For a few years you may flutter in some frivolous circle. But the time will come when you will sigh for any heart that could be found, and despair of one that can be faithful. Then will be the penal hour of retribution: then you will think of me with remorse, admiration and despair; then you will recall to your memory the passionate heart that you have forfeited, and the genius you have betrayed.13 She wrote back: 'For God's sake come to me. I am ill and almost distracted. I will answer all you wish. I never desird you to leave the house, or implied or thought a word about money.'14 They were married at St George's Hanover Square on 28 August 1839, after the end of the session. Bulwer and Lyndhurst were among the small number of guests, the latter best man. In spite of occasional squalls, mostly brought about by his debts, which were never fully disclosed to her, it was a very happy and successful marriage. It was just the anchor he needed, as he always recognized in gratitude. No doubt Mary Anne was right

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when in later days she declared: 'Dizzy married me for my money, but if he had the chance again he would marry me for love.' His political career was prominent among the considerations that propelled him into marriage. Yet for all his opportunism and eye for the main chance, it is difficult to attribute to him any consistent game plan. On occasion he still heaped the most fulsome flattery on Peel, but he had no sympathy with his leader's reluctance to bring the Melbourne government down. Peel's executive, administrative, governmental approach was alien to him. Disraeli saw the parliamentary arena as a battlefield, in which all sorts of temporary alliances might be formed to take the enemy in the rear. He was a not so young man in a hurry. Yet Disraeli continued to look avidly for any signs of favour from Peel and exaggerated the significance of minor gestures. Joining a lugubrious dinner party given by Peel, 'I threw a shot across the table and set them going, and in time they became even noisy. Peel, I think, was quite pleased that I broke the awful stillness, as he talked to me a good deal, though we were far removed; he sitting in the middle of the table.'15 It was in fact not likely that Peel should take a great deal of interest in him or think of him as more than a peripheral figure in politics. There was, on the other hand, no reason why Disraeli should not take an independent line on some issues, at a time when strict adherence to the party line was more the exception than the rule. His support for the corn laws on 16 March 1838, in his first major speech after the maiden speech fiasco, was in fact entirely orthodox. It was what one would expect of someone who was known as a friend of Lord Chandos. Disraeli had appeared at dinners of the Agricultural Associations, especially in his own county of Buckingham, in which Chandos was a prime mover. These associations were soon to become a counter-movement to the Anti-Corn Law League established in 1838. A year later, in March 1839, he spoke against the Irish Corporations Bill. The Melbourne government had failed for the last three years to get this counter-piece to the Municipal Corporations Bill for England through parliament. By 1839 Peel and Stanley accepted the Irish bill in principle. Ireland could not for ever be treated differently from the rest of the country, even if the result might be the domination of Irish municipalities by disaffected Catholics. Yet it is a phrase in Disraeli's speech that is still sometimes quoted: 'In England, where society was strong, they tolerated a weak

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government; but in Ireland, where society was weak, the policy should be to have the government strong.'16 Disraeli had this ability to coin pregnant phrases, what would now be called sound-bites. In the same session there was a debate on Lord John Russell's proposal to set up a standing committee of the Privy Council with oversight of the state grant to education. The grant, first introduced at £20,000 in 1833, was increased to £30,000. It was the beginning of a very important development, but ran into the denominational rivalries that bedevilled the expansion of the state's activity in education throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Disraeli opposed the proposal not on sectarian grounds, but because he thought paternal government and state education went hand in hand. Citing examples from China to Prussia, he declared: 'It had been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience was to commence tyranny in the nursery. ... They had always held that the individual should be strong and the Government weak, and that to diminish the duties of the citizen was to peril the rights of the subject. ... The same system which tyrannised in the nursery under the pretence of education would ... immure old age within hated walls, under the specious plea of affording relief.'17 Opposition to the poor law and to the centralization it implied was becoming a recurring theme of his speeches. By this time most of the squires, whom he otherwise supported, liked the new poor law, because it was cheaper. The new poor law was a reason why he called for understanding for the Chartists in what is the most notable of his speeches during these years. It was given on 12 July 1839 in the debate on a motion by Thomas Attwood, the leader of the Birmingham Political Union, to consider the National Petition of the Chartists which had been presented in solemn procession a month earlier. The two front benches were united in their attitude of contempt for the petition. Disraeli therefore spoke, as he wrote to Mary Anne, 'under every disadvantage; for the Tories, supposing the Debate on Chartism c[oul]d only be a discussion bet[wee]n the Whigs and Radicals, were very few of them there to support me, while all the Ministers were in their places and the Governmt. benches very full.'18 He suggested that they were dealing with something that was 'between an economical and a political cause'. He argued that people's civil rights had been invaded.

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He [Disraeli] was not one of those who ascribed the people's charter, as it was called, to the New Poor Law; but at the same time he believed there was an intimate connection between the two ... the old constitution had an intelligible principle, which the present had not. The former invested a small portion of the nation with political rights. Those rights were intrusted to that small class on certain conditions - that they should guard the civil rights of the great multitude. Great duties could alone confer great station, and the new class which had been invested with political station had not been bound up with the great mass of the people by the exercise of social duties. ... They raised the cry of cheap government. ... They taught the destitute not to look for relief to those who were their neighbours, but to a distant Government stipendiary. ...19 It was vintage Disraeli. He was still sufficiently proud of the speech a few years later to recall it in Sybil as 'very remarkable' and 'most really democratic'.20 He was a past master by now of putting his own gloss on recent as well more distant history and using it as a building block for his own distinctive philosophy. It was not the philosophy of Peel and of the Tamworth Manifesto. Peel wanted to fashion a moderate conservative block appealing to all the men of substance, the commercial middle classes as well as the territorial squirearchy and aristocracy. A few years later Disraeli wrote in Coningsby: 'The Tamworth Manifesto of 1834 was an attempt to construct a party without principles; its basis was necessarily Latitudinarianism; and its inevitable consequence has been Political Infidelity.'21 Disraeli envisaged a union between the landholding classes and the dispossessed masses held together by a bond of mutual obligation. Peel had a realistic strategy for the immediate future, Disraeli's imagery was a long-term vision. It was not that Disraeli thought that the Charter would nor should have any prospect of being realized. In a speech on a noconfidence motion in January 1840 he warned the Chartists 'that in a country so aristocratic as England, even treason to be successful must be patrician'.22 But he held to the line that the Chartists must be understood and not simply repressed. In 1839 he was in a minority of five, John Fielden, the factory act reformer, Tom Duncombe, John Leader and Thomas Wakley, all well-known Radicals, opposing an advance to the Birmingham Corporation to establish a police force to deal with the riots

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there. He insisted that there should be an inquiry into the causes of the insurrectionary spirit first. He wrote to Sarah: 'I have made up my mind to oppose, even if I stand alone on our side, every anti-insurrectionary Measure which the government announce they will bring forward. They may be necessary, and much more, but the Whigs are not the people who ought to have recourse to them - they ought to resign.'23 In 1840 he criticized the treatment of Chartist prisoners, claiming that 'there was no country in Europe, nor even in Siberia where such punishment had been inflicted'. He was a teller, with John Fielden, for a motion asking for an inquiry into the use of factory inspectors as 'political spies'. In 1841, on a Poor Law Amendment Bill, he again attacked the poor law, its centralizing tendency and the harsh treatment meted out in the union workhouses. Disraeli thus had no qualms about being associated, on occasion, with Radicals, Tory Radicals and the campaigns outside parliament against the poor law and in favour of factory legislation. At other times he effectively attacked the Whig government and was not sparing in his praise of Peel when the opportunity arose. Marriage meant that Disraeli now had the services of Mary Anne as a hostess and a splendid Park Lane mansion to give a boost to his political career. It made up for any temporary reluctance of hostesses like Lady Londonderry to have him in their salons, now that he was encumbered with a wife they considered distinctly bourgeoise. By February 1840 Mary Anne was asking sixty MPs to dinner and forty turned up. These efforts were mercilessly lampooned in the gossip rags: 'Was ever such an impudent, indolent, Hebrew varlet as this fellow, D'Israeli? "Ma shon Pen", as the old man was wont to call, is somebody now, at all events!'24 With Mary Anne on his arm he appeared at Stowe for a ball given by his friend Chandos, now the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, in honour of the Dowager Queen Adelaide. Buckingham was in debt on an even grander scale than Disraeli and was a few years later heading for bankruptcy. The ardently desired dissolution of parliament would make Disraeli's own financial position precarious again, for at this time his debts had reached something like £25,000, an enormous sum. It was the result of years of rolling them over at exorbitant rates of interest, particularly when they became so-called 'judgement debts'. Even if they had been fully disclosed to his father and Mary Anne, it would have been beyond their means to settle them fully. In October 1840 there was 'a terrible domestic crisis' when a writ

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was served at Grosvenor Gate in his absence. He was about to put his affairs into new hands, G.S. Ford, a London solicitor, whose writ had caused the domestic crisis. Ford used Mary Anne's credit and she spent probably as much as £13,000 on her husband's behalf. A letter to her from Benjamin of February 1842 suggests that she signed papers securing a loan of £5000 at 5 per cent from Ford. The letter ends: 'My sweet, sweet love - do not despair. I will hope. I am very wearied - but I love you - with all my heart & soul, as you love me.'25 Mary Anne was at Bradenham at the time and, probably without her knowledge and professions of love notwithstanding, an inventory of furniture and valuables at Grosvenor Gate was being made for Ford's benefit. It was no wonder that Mary Anne was jealous when she discovered that Sarah still knew some of her husband's secrets better than she did. He had to get his sister to send some of her letters to the Carlton Club, so that Mary Anne would not see them, and, unfortunately for his biographers, his correspondence with Sarah becomes less lively and revealing. In the meantime there had occurred the great political watershed of 1841, the change of government, which was also a decisive juncture in Disraeli's political career. In the budget the government proposed tentative steps towards freer trade, but they were defeated by a majority of 36. Peel then moved a vote of no confidence, on which, on 27 May 1841, Disraeli made an effective speech: The career of Her Majesty's present servants has been a singular one; they began by remodelling the House of Commons, and insulting the House of Lords; they then assaulted the Church - next the colonial constitutions; afterwards they assailed the municipalities of the kingdom, attacked the rich and the poor, and now, in their last moments, at one fell swoop, made war upon the colonial, commercial and agricultural interests.26 It was in the best 'slashing' mode and for good measure he coupled it with another ingratiating eulogy of Peel. After being defeated by one vote Melbourne at last asked for a dissolution. Disraeli had for some time been looking for a new constituency and he opted for Shrewsbury, on the advice of his friend Lord Forester, who had influence there. It was a two-member borough, divided between a Liberal and a Conservative since 1837. He travelled up with Mary Anne, who not only helped him all she

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could with money, but worked like a Trojan canvassing. Her gaiety and courage impressed the voters. There were the usual attacks on him as a Jew and carpetbagger. A man drove up with a cart drawn by an ass, a 'Jerusalem pony', to take him back to Jerusalem. More serious were leaflets scattered all over the town, giving a pretty accurate picture of his debts and the judgements against him. The leaflet continued: 'Honest Electors of Shrewsbury! Will you be represented by such a man? Can you confide in his pledges? Take warning by your brethren at Maidstone, whom Benjamin cannot face again. He seeks a place in Parliament merely for the purpose of avoiding the necessity of a Prison. ..." 27 In his rebuttal Disraeli claimed that many of the judgements were for collaterals for a 'Noble Friend' and were already settled. It is true that he had given some collateral for the even more improvident D'Orsay, but he was being economical with the truth. These shenanigans did not prevent Disraeli being elected on 30 June, only eight votes behind the established Tory member Tomline and 180 ahead of the nearest Liberal. Nationally the elections turned into a great Conservative victory, the first election in which the voters had clearly turned against the queen's ministers who had called the election. On the assembly of the new parliament the Conservatives moved an amendment to the address, which passed in the early hours of 28 August, by a majority of 360 to 269. This majority of ninety was an accurate measure of Peel's ascendancy and could have kept him in office for the full term of this parliament, some six or seven years. Peel kissed hands on 30 August. The queen had married Prince Albert in February 1840. He had prepared the ground well for the change of government and Peel formed his ministry with promptitude. There was no repeat of the Bedchamber Crisis, when the queen's refusal to appoint any Tory ladies-in-waiting had kept Peel out of office two years earlier. Senior appointments were presented to the queen on 31 August and most junior appointments followed by 3 September. When the expected letter from the new prime minister failed to come, Disraeli grew desperate. He wrote to Mary Anne from the Carlton, probably on Thursday, 2 September: 'My dear Polsy, I can't stay at this infernal club, and shall walk on to Crockfords for a change of scene....' 28 By the evening of Saturday, 4 September Mary Anne was writing, possibly with her husband's knowledge, to Sir Robert, with whose sister she was on friendly terms: 'I beg you

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not to be angry with me for my intrusion, but I am overwhelmed with anxiety. My husband's political career is for ever crushed, if you do not appreciate him,' and she reminded Peel: 'They will tell you at Maidstone that more than £40,000 was spent through my influence only.' The following day Disraeli himself wrote the famous letter in which, after the usual disclaimer about not troubling him 'with claims similar to those with which you must be wearied', there occurs the passage: 'But there is one peculiarity in my case on which I cannot be silent. I have had to struggle against a storm of political hate and malice, which few men ever experienced, from the moment, at the instigation of a member of your cabinet, I enrolled myself under your banner. ...' Peel, deliberately misunderstanding this passage, replied, on 7 September, saying that he had not given 'the slightest authority to make to you the communication to which you refer'. Disraeli wrote back the following day, saying he had never meant 'to intimate that a promise of official promotion had ever been made to me, at any time, by any member of yr. Cabinet'.29 On 6 September he had already written to his sister: All is over; and the crash wd be overwhelming, were it not for the heroic virtues of Mary Anne, whose ineffable tenderness and unwearied devotion never for a moment slacken. I must and ought to console myself for any worldly mortific[ati]on in the poss[essi]on of such a wife - but it was principally to honor her that I aspired to this baffled dignity. I cannot say that mine was a fool's Paradise for it was shared by the wise - Ly[ndhurs]t was stupified at the catastrophe and at all times expected more than I ever anticipated.30 Anyone who has seen the papers of nineteenth-century politicians knows that they are littered with requests for office and patronage. By writing to Peel Disraeli and his wife were not doing anything out of the ordinary, but Disraeli was living in a fool's paradise if he seriously expected office from Peel. There is no evidence that Peel ever considered giving it to him and no reason why he should have done so. Much has been written about this famous rejection, if one can call it that. George Smythe, already a friend, claimed later that the Tadpoles and Tapers in Peel's entourage, people like Crocker or Bonham, were responsible. Sir Philip Rose, Disraeli's confidential agent and executor, lays the responsibility at Stanley's door. He was

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supposed to have told Peel that 'if that scoundrel were taken in he would not remain himself'.31 Such explanations are unnecessary. The gulf between Peel and Disraeli, for all the superficial courtesy between them, is only too clear. There would have been no advantage for Peel in including this maverick figure in his government. Neither the patronage of Lyndhurst or Buckingham, nor the very different affinities with Oastler, Sadler or Fielden, would have been recommendations in Peel's eyes. He had, without enthusiasm, to include Lyndhurst and Buckingham in his cabinet, but they would not have had the leverage to bring about the inclusion of their protege, even if they had been inclined to exercise it. Shortly before Peel became prime minister Disraeli had again given proof of his unreliability. A letter had appeared in The Times under the pseudonym Psittacus attacking the speaker, Shaw-Lefevre, whom Peel wanted to keep in office. Psittacus warned Peel that he would not last beyond one session as minister if Shaw-Lefevre continued as speaker in the new parliament. A number of discontented backbenchers, mostly on the right of the party, originated this cabal and were supported by Lyndhurst and Buckingham. Disraeli was suspected of being Psittacus, but denied it in a letter to Peel. The denial does not sound entirely convincing. There was thus an immediate reason why Peel should not give office to Disraeli. It is an old trick for those seeking political preferment to make a nuisance of themselves. Disraeli did not have enough weight to be a nuisance, he was only an exotic gadfly. This is what Peel must have thought if he gave it a thought at all.

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Nothing is more dispiriting for a man with political ambitions than to be a backbencher without hope of office in a governing party with a large majority. This was the position in which Disraeli found himself after his rejection by Peel. He could not even be sure that his seat was secure, for there was a petition to unseat him and Tomline at Shrewsbury. If it had been successful it would have brought the mountain of his debts down upon him like an avalanche and even Mary Anne’s money might not have been able to save him from prison and disgrace. In the autumn of 1841 he and Mary Anne spent nearly three months in Caen, ‘vagabonding’ as he put it, an escape from failure and disappointment, but no less an escape from his creditors, their appetite sharpened by the petition. Back in Grosvenor Gate for the first full session of the new parliament in February 1842 he found his position parlous. The battle to keep his head above water financially was at its dangerous height, while Mary Anne was fretting at Bradenham. He wrote to her; ‘You cannot conceive how solitary I feel: utterly isolated. Before the change of government, political party was a tie among men, but now it is only a tie among men who are in office. The supporter of administration, who is not in place & power himself, is a solitary animal. He has neither hope, nor fear.’’ No doubt he was begging for sympathy from his much-tried wife, whom he was asking to sign papers mortgaging her wealth, while still keeping her more in the dark than his sister. Disraeli did not allow himself to be discouraged for long. His ability to shut the door on failure and anticipate new triumphs was legendary. His solipsistic self-obsession made martyrdom by a hostile world into a springboard for future victories.

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Disraeli's conduct in the new House of Commons did not for a time differ greatly from the line he had taken before being disappointed of office. Even before the queen had opened parliament the Duke of Buckingham, his patron and the titular head of the agricultural interest, resigned from the cabinet over Peel's proposal to bring in a new sliding scale for the duty on corn. This and the reintroduction of the income tax were the centrepieces of the new government's fiscal policy. Disraeli went out of his way not to be seen among the malcontents. He wrote to Mary Anne that there was an intentionally circulated rumour that he had joined them 'but the fact is I have had a thorough understanding with Freemantle [the Conservative whip] throughout; or at least for the last week; & I am sure the governmt themselves had, or rather have not now the slightest doubt of my supporting them. Howr. my presence at the late divisions has been most politic & necessary.'2 As the session progressed, his support for policies such as the reintroduction of the income tax, unpopular with many Conservative backbenchers, was usually voiced with reservations and with a degree of independence. But it was not the time to challenge Peel, the powerful minister at the head of a large majority. 'The Income Tax, or rather the Property & Income Tax, is a thunderbolt - but Peel can do anything at this moment,' he wrote to Mary Anne in March 1842.3 In the meantime he had retained his visibility in the House by introducing a motion on the consular service with a speech lasting two hours and twenty minutes, delivered without notes and full of carefully chosen details. In the debate he crossed swords with Palmerston: 'Well you are one of the few who have broken lances with Palmerston & rode away in triumph,' a friend told him.4 Another theme he made his own was Afghanistan, which he connected with the tight fiscal position making the reintroduction of the income tax necessary. Ironically, in view of the role Afghanistan was to play in the final stages of his career, he castigated the first Afghan war undertaken under the Melbourne government as unnecessary. He was beginning to turn himself into something of an expert on foreign affairs. When he was defending Peel's tariff reforms in May 1842 he argued that the Tories Pitt and Shelburne were the real originators of a commercial policy of freer trade, while Fox and the Whigs were still preaching restriction. Liverpool had temporarily abandoned commercial principles, but they had been re-established through the policies of Canning. Then it was Palmerston who had made one

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European country after another put up barriers and had turned them against commercial treaties. For the moment it was still politic to attack Palmerston rather than the policies of Peel's government. At the end of the session, in August 1842, he was still sufficiently impressed with Peel to write to his sister: 'Last night Peel made the most effective speech by very far I ever heard from him. He crushed Palmerston, who on the last night, like an excited player, lost on one dashing stake, all his hardwon winnings of the last month.' In the same letter he mentions that Freemantle had 'ask'd me after Peel's speech to reply to any man of note who rose on the opposite benches'.5 But to be a conformist hack was not a role that could possibly satisfy him. A few weeks later Disraeli and Mary Anne went to Paris until the beginning of the next parliamentary session in January 1843. With Grosvenor Gate shut up and the servants on board wages it may have been an economy measure. Disraeli was now, with his wife's income, on a more even keel financially and she may well have been more fully apprised of the situation. The couple could thus enjoy a brilliant social life, one of the mainstays of which was D'Orsay's sister, the Duchesse de Grammont. Also present in Paris were two men and their wives whom he was now seeing more of, Henry Hope and Anthony de Rothschild. Both were so rich that, as he told his sister, they could buy up all the 100 men in France who had £10,000 per annum. Hope was a member of a banking family of Dutch origin, at whose house at Deepdene the Disraelis made frequent and prolonged stays. Although Disraeli was thus not unduly dazzled by the French aristocracy and their resplendent titles, he was flattered by the attention paid to him and Mary Anne by the great and the good of France, Guizot, Thiers, Sainte Beuve, and countless others. Most flattering of all were a number of intimate audiences granted him by the King, Louis Philippe. He drew up a remarkable memorandum for the king, in which he sketched a way in which British foreign policy might be influenced in favour of a close relationship with France: The governmt. of Sir Robt. Peel is at this moment upheld by an apparent majority in the Commons of 90 members. It is known that among these 90 are bet[wee]n 40 & 50 agricultural malcontents who tho' not prepared to commence an active opposition, will often be absent on questions wh: tho' not of vital may yet be of great importance to the Minister. It is obvious therefore that ano[the]r section of

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Disraeli conservatives members full of youth & energy, & constant in their seats, must exercise an irresistible control over the tone of the Minister. ... When the writer of this note states that such a party can be formed he speaks with an absolute knowledge of his subject. A gent[leman] has already been solicited to place himself at the head of a parliam[entar]y party wh: there is every reason to believe wd. adopt the views on the For[eig]n Policy of England referred to, a party of the youth of England.6

As so often in his life, Disraeli was exaggerating. But it was during this stay in Paris that George Smythe and Alexander Baillie-Cochrane had discussed with him voting together in the next parliamentary session. Together with Lord John Manners they were to be the core of Young England. Romantic nationalism spawned Young Italy, Young Ireland, and therefore 'Young England' was a label that easily came to hand. A 'Young England' dining club, centred round Richard Monckton Milnes, is mentioned in 1838, but Disraeli was not part of it. He was referred to as 'of the junge Judenthum, not the young England'.7 Smythe and Manners, Cambridge undergraduates, fell under the spell of Frederick Faber, an Oxford don, follower of Newman and also later a convert to Catholicism, during a reading holiday in the Lake District in 1838. From Faber derives the whiff of homoeroticism that attaches to some of the relationships within the group. Through Faber's influence, his sermons and his poetry, their dissatisfaction with the burgeoning industrialism and commercialism of contemporary society and their concern over 'the Condition of England' crystallized into a recognizable ideology. It was a reaction against the selfish greed and the loss of mutuality and community in a society based on the individual and the market. Much of it was nostalgic longing for an idealized past that never existed, but essentially the same protest against contemporary trends motivated writers from Carlyle to Ruskin and William Morris. It was an outlook not many miles removed from what Disraeli had articulated in his literary and political output. The three 'Young Englanders' entered the Commons in 1841: Smythe won Canterbury in a byelection in February 1841; Manners was Gladstone's running mate at Newark in the general election; Baillie-Cochrane was defeated at Bridport in the general election but obtained the seat shortly afterwards as a result of a petition. Almost as soon as

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parliament met in 1842 Disraeli was boasting to Mary Anne; 'I already find myself with[ou]t effort the leader of a party - chiefly of the youth, & new members. Ld. John Manners came to see me about a motion which he wanted me to bring forward....' 8 With his own youth slipping away and the disappointments of middle age gathering about him, it provided a vicarious satisfaction to act as mentor to rising young men. The combination of blue blood, good looks and some talent appealed to Disraeli throughout his later life, as it did to many others, including Gladstone. George Smythe was by all accounts such a charismatic young man, but soon developed a degree of worldliness and cynicism, as well as becoming a bon viveur and womanizer. Perhaps Disraeli saw something of himself in Smythe, or what he might have become had he been less disciplined and driven. Smythe is portrayed as Waldershare in Disraeli's late novel Endymion. He never fulfilled his early promise and died in 1857 before he was forty. He was the eldest son of Lord Strangford, an Irish peer and distinguished diplomatist, who was a friend of Disraeli. Lord John Manners, the second son of the 5th Duke of Rutland, had less brilliance but greater gravitas. From his days at Eton and Trinity, Cambridge, he inspired almost universal affection. Baillie-Cochrane, two years older than the other two, was also a product of Eton and Trinity. In Coningsby Disraeli portrays Manners as Lord Henry Sydney, of 'sweet disposition', Cochrane as Buckhurst, of 'gay profusion, acquired without an effort'. Cochrane was frequently inconsistent and the Morning Herald, a Peelite organ, said of him that nonsense 'driven from Mr D'Israeli's novels, has taken refuge in the "graceful" Mr Cochrane's pericranium'. Young England at any rate got themselves written and talked about, not least because of Disraeli's association with them, but they were in no sense a party, and even the four core members often did not vote together. Disraeli himself was careful not to get too fully identified with it. At the end of the session of 1843, when Young England had begun to attract notice, the Morning Herald said: 'Mr Smythe is one of those smart, fine, generalising gentlemen who discover "principles" in door-posts. ... Lord John Manners ... sighs for a Strafford. ... These two gentlemen are the prime movers of Young England; and that tomfoolery is the political offshoot of Tractarianism. Mental dandyism is its chiefest characteristic.'9 Disraeli did not want to become associated with Tractarianism, unpopular and suspected of Romanizing tendencies, though he fully shared the vision of his

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acolytes that the Church must recover its function as the spiritual guide and mentor of the community. In the trilogy there are passages of respect for the Roman Catholic Church. The seriousminded Manners wrote in his journal: 'Could I only satisfy myself that D'Israeli believed all he said, I should be more happy: his historical views are quite mine, but does he believe them?'10 The more cynical Smythe observed: 'Dizzy's attachment to moderate Oxfordism is something like Bonaparte's to moderate Mohammedanism.'11 Disraeli was probably influenced considerably by Manners, or at least driven to think much about religion and the Church. His very individual views on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, as they subsequently appear in the Trilogy, may well have had a starting point in the need to absorb some of the views of Manners, sentiments such as are expressed in his poem 'England's Trust'. There is one couplet in this poem which, because capable of ironic interpretation, is always quoted in order to pour ridicule on Young England: Let wealth and commerce, law and learning die But leave us still our old Nobility! Nostalgic sentimentality of this kind pervades the poem. In his general preface to the 1870 edition of his novels Disraeli retrospectively, but not incorrectly summarized the intentions of Young England: To change back the oligarchy into a generous aristocracy round a real throne; to infuse life and vigour into the Church, as the trainer of the nation ...; to establish a commercial code on the principles successfully negotiated by Lord Bolingbroke at Utrecht ... to govern Ireland according to the policy of Charles I, not of Oliver Cromwell; to emancipate the political constituency of 1832 from its sectarian bondage and its contracted sympathies; to elevate the physical as well as the moral condition of the people, by establishing that labour required regulation as much as property; and all this by the use of ancient forms and the restoration of the past than by political revolutions founded on abstract ideas .... In the session of 1843 grumbles about Peel and his leadership were increasing in the Conservative party. Disraeli maintained his general support of the ministry and for pragmatism in

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commercial policy. When half a dozen years later he was as a leader trying to wean his followers from protectionism, he could justly claim that he had never been dogmatic in his opposition to free trade. Disraeli went out of his way to defend Peel's policy to his constituents at Shrewsbury in May 1843: 'You should not part with him for what he has done; neither should you part with him because you think he will do a certain act which I believe he will not.'12 He cannot have had much hope now that he would receive office from Peel and his interest was turning back to literature. The previous November Smythe had already urged him to 'write something ... presuming a split in the ranks of Ministerialism or a Swift-like description of the Cabinet - or its policy'.13 His first really strong attack on the ministry came towards the end of the session, on Ireland. It was one of the peak years of Irish agitation, given a new twist by the rise of nationalism. It was the year of O'Connell's monster meetings. Peel's response was a mixture of firmness, an Arms Act being the immediate reason for Disraeli's speech, and the sending of 'messages of peace'. Young England had produced a real change in Disraeli's views on Ireland, from the racist invective of his tangles with O'Connell to an advocacy of understanding, of ruling Ireland on the principles of Charles I and not Oliver Cromwell. Smythe and Manners, both with Irish links, had already gone over to the attack, only to be brusquely rebuffed by Peel. Disraeli's attack hit its target harder. The Morning Chronicle described Peel as endeavouring to 'palliate the effects of the castigation by industriously rubbing his nose'; while Graham, the home secretary and pilot of the Arms Bill, was 'edging occasionally round, would look up in the face of the orator with that sort of uneasy smile by which one sometimes tries to convey the idea of being not only perfectly at ease, but exceedingly amused'.14 A week later Disraeli was on the attack again, criticising the government's inaction over Russian interference in Serbia and the threat it constituted to the Ottoman Empire. It foreshadowed the thrust of his policy in the 1870s and on this occasion he was making common cause with Palmerston against Peel. Referring to Peel's reply to his previous inquiry on Serbia, Disraeli said sarcastically: 'an inquiry couched, I believe, in Parliamentary language, and made with all the respect which I feel for the right hon. gentleman, and to which the right hon. gentleman replied with all that explicitness of which he is a master, and all that courtesy which he reserves

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only for his supporters'.15 The knives were out and the breach between the government and Young England was widely talked about. Disraeli misquoted the Morning Chronicle with pride to his sister: 'The Ministry now so humbled and so changed that Young England drives its mystic chariot, with Disraeli & his ambiguous comrades on the car, over the prostrate body of the Ministry'. The paper had also written that 'there is one member of Y.Engd. [the author of V.G. &c] who we make little doubt, thinks himself equal both to Wm. Pitt & Wm. Shakespeare'.16 It was to literature that Disraeli now turned, but literature with a political message. Coningsby, written in the autumn and winter of 1843/44, was a Young England manifesto and can claim to be the first political novel in English. It also contains a good deal of criticism of Peel and Peelism, often barbed and sarcastic, but no more than mildly malicious: It would seem, therefore, that Sir Robert Peel, from an early period, meditated his emancipation from the political confederacy in which he was implicated, and that he has been continually baffled in this project. He broke loose from Lord Liverpool; he retired from Mr Canning. Forced again into becoming the subordinate leader of the weakest government in parliamentary annals, he believed he had at length achieved his emancipation, when he declared to his late colleagues, after the overthrow of 1830, that he would never again accept a secondary position in office.17 It was just such an 'emancipation' that was to be the main accusation Disraeli was to fling against Peel with deadly effect two years later. Coningsby was published in May 1844. In writing it Disraeli was much influenced by his Young England associates. There is a lot about its principal hero that suggests a graver version of Smythe. Disraeli felt the need to define a faith and to provide a kind of Bildungsroman for a whole nation: Coningsby found that he was born in an age of infidelity in all things, and his heart assured him that a want of faith was a want of nature. But his vigorous intellect could not take refuge in that maudlin substitute for belief which consists in a patronage of fantastic theories. He needed that deep and enduring conviction that the heart and the intellect, feeling and reason united, can alone supply. He

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asked himself why governments were hated, and religions despised? Why loyalty was dead, and reverence only a galvanised corpse?18 There is the curious figure of Sidonia. He 'had exhausted all the sources of human knowledge; he was the master of the learning of every nation. ... No Minister had such communications with secret agents and political spies. ... He held relations with all the clever outcasts of this world ...'. It was a conflation of Disraeli and Lionel de Rothschild. His relations with the Rothschild family had become close, were useful to him and he no doubt felt that this portrait would be flattering. Into Sidonia's mouth he puts remarks that race is all-important; in a later letter to the Morning Post he supports a current fivefold classification of races, Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, American and Ethiopian. The Caucasian race he declares to be superior and the Jews were the only Caucasian race that has remained pure and unmixed: The fact is, you cannot destroy a pure race of the Caucasian organization. It is a physiological fact; a simple law of nature. ... No penal laws, no physical tortures, can effect that a superior race should be absorbed in an inferior, or be destroyed by it. The mixed persecuting races disappear; the pure persecuted race remains.19 This was written before the rise of modern racial antiSemitism, but might well serve as a bible for it, as would the passages about Jewish world conspiracies and the central presence of Jews in every movement or institution of any importance. The Jews are, however, defended against the accusation that 'the once loyal Hebrew [is] invariably arrayed in the same ranks as the leveller and the latitudinarian'.20 This only happens if society and its powerful classes deliberately degrade the Jews. As so often with Disraeli the question arises how literally one is to take him. He always made it clear that none of his characters are to be taken in a narrowly representational sense and the same holds for ideas and opinions. There is often an ironical, tonguein-cheek dimension in his writing. Truth for Disraeli cannot be rationally encompassed, only imaginatively. Writing was for him a catharsis. At this point he had to come to terms with his role as mentor and ideologue of a group of believers, when he himself was uneasily poised between scepticism and faith and when he

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always was 'the blank page between the Old and the New Testament'. Perhaps Harriet Martineau had a point when she refused to read Coningsby. She told Monckton Milnes: 'D's charlatanerie offends me so and so destroys trust in his sayings, that I had rather avoid the provocation of reading him. I never could respect or like a man who feels no pain in making himself ridiculous, with and by personal pretension; and the more genius he may have, the worse the case.'21 Disraeli was always out of tune with those who thought of themselves as serious-minded and rational. Intellectuals always cordially disliked him and his own feelings towards sheer intellect were ambivalent. Love of it is one of the cold, alienating characteristics with which he invests Sidonia. On the other hand he was contemptuous of those who lacked intelligence. Coningsby sold well, 'moving about 40 a day on average', he told Sarah a month after publication. In the meantime the session of 1844 had begun without Disraeli receiving the usual circular from the party leader. He wrote to Peel defending his conduct in the previous session and the prime minister replied in a moderately conciliatory manner. Disraeli was still anxious to avoid an open breach and at the end of the first big debate of the session, again on Ireland, the four Young Englanders supported the government in the lobby. Disraeli made a big and notable speech on the Irish situation in this debate, not in any way recanting the views he had expressed in the previous session. It contained the famous and often quoted passage: 'That dense population [the Irish] inhabits an island where there is an Established Church which is not their Church and a territorial aristocracy the richest of whom live in distant capitals. Thus you have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world. That is the Irish question.' Peel complimented him on 'his very able speech ... not the less to be admired because it departed from the ordinary routine of Parliamentary eloquence and touched on more comprehensive and general views'.22 The position of the government was, however, becoming difficult, in spite of a marked improvement in the economic situation. Conservative divisions were highlighted by votes on factory legislation in May and on sugar duties in June 1844. On the Factory Bill the government was opposed to the ten-hour amendment moved by Lord Ashley, yet it was passed by nine votes amid much cheering and hat-waving from the Tory benches. The

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government then introduced a new bill and this time, under threat from the whips, Ashley's amendment was defeated by a large majority, 297 to 159. It left much resentment. Disraeli and his friends had supported Ashley throughout, and he could be regarded as being on the fringe of their group. A month later a similar clash occurred on the proposal to make a large reduction in the duty on foreign free-grown sugar and a smaller one on colonial sugar, effectively reducing colonial protection. A motion with the effect of increasing the colonial preference was passed against the government by twenty votes. Disraeli was paired against the government. Peel now threatened resignation. A meeting of some two hundred Tory MPs at the Carlton Club passed a motion regretting the rumour of an intended resignation by ministers and expressing 'an anxious desire for their continued maintenance in Power', but also reserving 'to themselves the full exercise of an independent judgment'. Disraeli and a few others voted against this motion. In the House the vote was reversed, but it looked as if Peel had been seriously weakened. Disraeli made an effective speech, in his best sarcastic vein. He called Peel's demand that his followers should change their vote 'degrading', suggested that he 'should deign to consult a little more the feelings of his supporters' and not 'drag them unreasonably through the mire'. If there was a dissolution his constituents would support him for not changing his vote 'within forty-eight hours at the menace of a Minister'. Peel had claimed a horror of slavery and slave-grown sugar, but his attitude did not extend to the benches behind him: 'There the gang is still assembled, and there the thong of the whip still sounds. ...' In the words of a Whig, Sir John Cam Hobhouse, later Lord Broughton: 'There was a tremendous cheer and Peel, Stanley, and Graham, sat in most painful silence and submission to the rebuke amidst the applause of many near and all opposite them. I never saw them look so wretched.'23 Hobhouse had been at a dinner the day before at Lionel de Rothschild's, where Disraeli met leading figures in the Whig opposition, including Russell and Lansdowne. Disraeli is supposed to have declared 'that Peel had completely failed to keep together his party and must go, if not now at least very speedily'.24 In fact Peel survived by 22 votes, but even Gladstone thought that 'a great man had committed a great error'. Peel's hectoring and cracking of the whip had not induced many of his backbenchers to change their vote. Only two did so over the reversal of the factory legislation and four

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over the sugar duties and the government was rescued by a change in the balance of abstention and support. After the end of the session, at the end of August, Disraeli, this time without Mary Anne, went to Shrewsbury to explain himself to his constituents. He repudiated any suggestions that his attack on Peel was due to the fact that he had not been given office. 'Sir Robert Peel knows me too well to think for a moment that any pecuniary circumstances influence my conduct' and concluded with the resounding sally, 'I was [Peel's] supporter when in adversity - in prosperity I will not be his slave'.25 In October 1844 Disraeli, Smythe and Manners paid a famous visit to Manchester and spoke at the Athenaeum. Disraeli and Mary Anne had already been there a year earlier, when he spoke at a literary meeting at the Free Trade Hall, with Charles Dickens in the chair. He had paid graceful tribute to Cobden, another speaker at the meeting. He had denounced as vulgar and superficial the prejudice 'which associated with commerce and manufacture an inability to sympathise with the fair inventions of art and poetic creations of the human intellect'.26 He made comparisons with the great patrons of art in Renaissance Italy. In Coningsby he makes the hero visit the city and comprehend its meaning: In this unprecedented partnership between capital and science ... he beheld a great source of the wealth of nations which had been reserved for these times, and he perceived that this wealth was rapidly developing classes whose power was imperfectly recognized in the constitutional scheme, and whose duties in the social system seemed altogether omitted.27 The fathers of Smythe and Manners disliked Disraeli's influence over their sons and felt uneasy over their opposition to the Tory government. Initially they opposed the visit in October 1844, but were reassured that it was only a literary occasion. 'I do not know Mr Disraeli by sight, but have respect only for his talents, which I think he sadly misuses,' wrote the Duke of Rutland.28 The Athenaeum meeting was attended by a mainly middle-class audience of three thousand, who had paid five shillings for a double ticket. Disraeli in his speech emphasized the importance of education for the working classes. 'Knowledge is like the mystic ladder in the patriarch's dream,' he said. He went on: 'If that principle of duty had not been lost sight of in the last fifty years, you would never have heard of the classes into which

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England is divided. ... We want to put an end to that political and social exclusiveness which we believe to be the bane of this country. .. '29 Manchester was a high point for Young England, particularly for Smythe, whose speech was most enthusiastically received. The Morning Chronicle wrote: 'With all this conceit, Coningsbeism, and silly stuff about the "pure Caucasian breed", we think that Young England has done and is doing no little service, and may yet accomplish, under better guidance and better direction, vastly more.'30 Disraeli was probably under no illusion that his little band could transform the parliamentary situation and for the next session a kind of self-denying ordinance seems to have been adopted. He had retreated to Bradenham to work on his next novel, Sybil, and wrote to Manners: 'I agree with you: seclusion for us & our friends is not only the most agreeable, but the most politic, thing at this moment.'31 Sybil was his way of carrying on their campaign. As a novel it has less coherence than Coningsby and the plot, never very strong, is brought to an abrupt and rather unsatisfactory conclusion. For the first time Disraeli attempts scenes of working-class life, with considerable success, and graphically depicts the miseries of industrialism. He drew some of his material from personal observations, but more from parliamentary blue books, something he did not advertise, for fear it might damage sales. The real strength of the book lies in what would now be called its sociological insights. Disraeli was coming to conclusions remarkably similar to those that Marx and Engels were reaching at almost the same time, but, unlike them, he avoided lapsing into dogmatic futurology. There is again a great deal of historical propaganda, with a further elaboration of the anti-Whig view of English history. There is sympathy for Roman Catholicism, particularly in the figure of Aubrey St Lys, who cares for the poor. Needless to say, Peel, 'the gentleman in Downing Street', does not escape unscathed. He instructs his faithful functionary Mr Hoaxem to give one version of his policy to 'our friend Colonel Bosky, the member for the county of Calfshire, and a deputation of tenant farmers', and to 'say exactly the reverse' to 'the deputation of the manufacturers of Mowbray, complaining of the great depression of trade, and total want of remunerating profits'.32 Sybil, like Coningsby, was written rapidly, but sales and royalties were now less of a consideration for Disraeli than reputation and impact. There

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was, however, still a sense in which he was falling between two stools, between his ambition to be recognized as an artist and a politician. The theological views expressed, Christianity as completed Judaism and other assertions derived from it, were hardly opportune. The sheer pressure of work on him was great and when on May Day 1845 he at last finished the book he wrote to Sarah: 'I have never been thro' such a four months, & hope never again. What with the House of Commons wh: was itself quite eno' for a man & writing 600 pages, I thought sometimes my head must turn. ...' 33 Political prospects were not at all good for him at the beginning of the parliamentary session of 1845. In spite of all the tensions within the Tory party, Peel was firmly in the saddle and the country calmer and more prosperous than it had been. He wrote to Sarah, after hearing Gladstone's baffling explanation of why he had resigned over the increase of the Maynooth Grant when he actually supported it: 'Gladstone's address was involved & ineffective. He may have an avenir but I hardly think it. With Stanley [elevated to the Lords], G. & Follett [the attorneygeneral, who was sick and abroad], gone, Peel will have a weak Treasury Bench for debate - but this is not the age of Non Confidence - & I don't see much trouble before him - tho' storms rise in Park, like squalls in the Medit[erranea]n - in a moment.'34 He thought that they were in the third year of a 'Walpole administration' and suggested that there might be another seventeen to go. His own attacks on the Conservative front bench now became sharper and in the course of the session he delivered three Philippics against Peel, phrases from which are still sometimes quoted. He saw himself, as he put it in a letter probably meant for publication, resisting 'a parliamentary dictatorship'. At the beginning of the session a matter that had excited much controversy in the previous year came up again and provided him with the opportunity for the first broadside. It was the opening of Mazzini's letters in the post, under a Home Office warrant. Tom Duncombe, the Radical, claimed that his own letters had been opened, and Disraeli seconded a motion for a select committee of inquiry. He attacked Peel for having put on a show of emotion: 'I believe that some of the younger members were much frightened, but I advised them not to be terrified. I told them that the right hon. baronet would not eat them up, would not even resign; the very worst thing he would do would be to tell them to rescind a vote.' There was loud cheering and

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laughter. The next day Peel replied: 'He undertakes to assure the House that my vehemence was all pretended, and warmth all simulated. I on the contrary will do him entire justice; I do believe that his bitterness was not simulated, but that it was entirely sincere.' He then quoted the lines of Canning: 'Give me the avowed, the erect, the manly foe.... Save, save , O save me from the candid friend!' Since Peel's conduct towards Canning was by many considered dubious, it was not a very fortunate quote. A week later Disraeli returned to the attack, with remarks that have become famous: The right hon. gentleman caught the Whigs bathing, and walked away with their clothes. He has left them in the full enjoyment of their liberal position, and he is himself a strict conservative of their garments.... Some lines, for example, upon friendship, written by Mr Canning, and quoted by the right hon. gentleman! The theme, the poet, the speaker what a felicitous combination!35 The battle had become very personalized and Disraeli, even though still only a backbencher of no great weight, was finding a way of getting under the prime minister's skin. He was cheered on by backbenchers who had their own resentments against their leaders. Writing to his sister he claimed: 'As for P. he was stunned and stupid - lossed [sic] his head, & vacillating bet[wee]n silence and spleen, spoke much and weakly. Never was greater failure! Assuring me that I had not hurt his feelings - that he wd. never reciprocate personalities gain, having no leisure - The bell!'36 Disraeli had found a mocking, sarcastic note that exactly suited the circumstances and gave great enjoyment to members who were prevented by party loyalty and inarticulacy from expressing their real feelings. The second Philippic came in one of the great free trade versus protection debates initiated by Cobden. It was in the course of this debate that Peel was said to have found himself unable to answer the arguments of Cobden and to have turned to Sidney Herbert, sitting next to him, 'You must answer this, for I cannot'. On the substance of the argument Disraeli stuck to his pragmatic line, at one stage voting with the government. He put his finger on the weak spot of the free trade case, namely that Cobden had convinced himself that if we gave up protection everybody else would do the same. But then he delivered another mocking attack on Peel as a turncoat:

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Disraeli There is no doubt a difference in the right hon.gentleman's demeanour as leader of the Opposition and as Minister of the Crown. But that's the old story; you must not contrast too strongly the hours of courtship with the years of possession. ... My hon. friends reproach the right hon. gentleman ... [he] sends down his valet, who says in the genteelest manner: 'We can have no whining here'. ... Dissolve, if you please the Parliament you have betrayed, and appeal to the people, who, I believe, mistrust you. For me there remains this at least - the opportunity of expressing thus publicly my belief that a Conservative Government is an organised hypocrisy.37

Disraeli's third major onslaught on the government came over the decision to increase the Maynooth Grant, one of Peel's 'messages of peace' to Ireland. Considering his previous criticisms of Peel's Irish policy as too negative, he might have been expected to welcome this move. But he was now determined to nail the prime minister on the cross of inconsistency and betrayal. He was prepared to be associated with the most bigoted anti-Catholics, but he knew that at Shrewsbury such a line would be popular. Smythe and Manners supported the government and the Tories as a whole were divided almost evenly. Yet Disraeli was determined to drive home the attack on Peel by calling him 'a great Parliamentary middleman. It is well known what a middleman is; he is a man who bamboozles one party, and plunders the other, till, having obtained a position to which he is not entitled, he cries out: "Let us have no party questions, but fixity of tenure".' He finished by urging the House to bring back 'that which it has for so long a time past been without - the legitimate influence and salutary check of a constitutional Opposition. ... Let us do it at once in the only way it can be done, by dethroning this dynasty of deception, by putting an end to the intolerable yoke of official despotism and Parliamentary imposture.' Peel is said by Hobhouse to have 'hung his head down, changing colour and drawing his hat over his eyes'.38 This was on 11 April 1845. In the following three weeks he was hard at work finishing Sybil and then felt the need to relax. He enjoyed the acclaim and social success that now came to him as a novelist of significance and as an independent member of parliament with a high profile. He was no nearer power and it

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was hard to envisage circumstances under which he might obtain it. He was also still juggling around his debts and was having to hang around the Carlton to make sure the true state of his affairs did not reach Mary Anne's ears. Mary Anne's health was bad and she seems to have been in a somewhat hysterical state. Shortly afterwards the Disraelis departed for the continent, spending two months in the small Flemish town of Cassel, completely isolated, their only contact with affairs at home being Galignani's Messenger, the English-language paper that Disraeli had relied on for news way back on his tour in the Levant. He made a start on the third volume of the trilogy, Tancred. At the end of November they went to Paris, plunging again into a social whirl of duchesses, ministers and ambassadors. Shortly after their arrival news of the political crisis in England reached them. On 27 November a letter from Lord John Russell to his constituents in the City of London appeared in The Times, condemning the government for prevarication in face of the Irish potato famine and advocating the total repeal of the corn laws. Russell was anxious not to be outflanked by Peel, but the prime minister found it impossible to keep his cabinet together on a policy of suspending and then permanently modifying the corn laws. He resigned on 6 December. In Paris Disraeli again found himself being consulted by the king. He undertook to act as an intermediary between Louis Philippe and Palmerston, who was expected to return as Whig foreign secretary. Disraeli portrays himself as doing his level best to calm the fears of the French king, allegedly still subsisting from Palmerston's previous period of office. Palmerston thanked Disraeli for his efforts, but there was probably more to this episode than meets the eye or that the surviving evidence allows one to guess. At this stage Disraeli may have seen some future for himself under a Whig government, perhaps in a diplomatic appointment. He seems to have been concerned to blacken the names of the current British ambassador in Paris, Lord Cowley, and his secretary, Lord William Hervey, to Palmerston. His views as to the outcome of the crisis fluctuated. At first he believed that Peel had really gone and there is a significant phrase in the letter to Palmerston: 'the great object of my political life is now achieved', presumably the fall of Peel. He was disappointed when Russell failed to form a government, but thought that if Peel returned it would not be in triumph. 'No one will now talk of a Walpolian Government,' he wrote.39 He told Palmerston that he would not hurry back from Paris and did

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not in fact leave till 16 January. A few days earlier he had written to Sarah: 'Politics seem more wild &c confused than ever. It appears to me that Peel's difficulties are insurmountable: but what is to follow I cannot divine.'40 The decisive moment of his life was approaching.

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When Disraeli went to France in September 1845, for health and economy reasons, he was still seen by the world mainly as a novelist of some fame. It was incidental that he was also a Tory backbencher who occasionally attracted notice by making clever speeches, most of them attacking his own front bench. His first letter to Sarah after landing in France still shows his almost childlike delight when he discovered that his literary fame had spread even this far: 'Our first walk at Boulogne we found Sybil affiched in a large placard "Disraeli's new novel" in every window.'1 When he returned to England in January he was about to be transformed into a major actor on the political stage, whose name was familiar to every newspaper reader. Peel had resumed office in December 1845 determined not only to suspend, but to repeal the corn laws after a three-year transition period. It was to be part of a package of further tariff reductions, to avoid the impression that domestic agriculture was being singled out for sacrifice. His justification was that the situation in Ireland made it essential to open the ports and that a later reimposition of the corn laws would be impossible. A return to protection in the corn trade would dangerously exacerbate tension between the classes. He admitted that he himself had changed his mind on the issue of free trade. He claimed, however, to be acting essentially in keeping with Conservative principles. In his speech on the opening of Parliament on 22 January 1846 he said: I have thought it consistent with true Conservative policy, to promote so much of happiness and contentment among the people that the voice of disaffection should no longer be heard, and thoughts of the dissolution of our institutions should be forgotten in the midst of physical enjoyment.2

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Disraeli had already set out the nub of his argument against Peel in writing to Manners from Paris in December: 'He [Peel] is so vain that he wants to figure in history as the settler of all the great questions, but a Parliamentary constitution is not favorable to such ambitions; things must be done by parties, not by persons using parties as tools - especially men without imagination or any inspiring qualities, or who, rather offer you duplicity instead of inspiration.'3 Initially Peel felt encouraged and buoyant. He reconstructed his government, suffering only one really important defection, Stanley. George Smythe joined the ministry as under-secretary for foreign affairs. Years ago he had written to Manners: 'to be of power, or fame, or even office, we cannot ... be too much lies with Disraeli'. To Disraeli Smythe now wrote: 'whatever your feelings towards me, I shall ever feel to you as to a man of genius who succoured and solaced and strengthened me when I was deserted even by myself'.4 Young England was well and truly in the past as a working group, but not as a source of ideas. In his first speech in the debate on the address Peel gave an account of the events in cabinet during the previous month, deliberately boring the House with tedious detail. In describing the scene a few years later in his biography of Lord George Bentinck, Disraeli wrote: When a senate after a long interval and the occurrence of startling transactions assembles, if not to impeach, at least to denounce, a minister, and then are gravely anointed with domestic lard, and invited to speculate on the price of salt pork, an air of littleness is irresistibly infused into the affair from which it seems hopeless to extricate the occasion. But then Disraeli writes, without mentioning himself by name: With the elements of opposition, however considerable, so inert and desponding, the first night might give the cue to the country. Perceiving this, a member, who, though on the tory benches, had been for two sessions in opposition to the ministry, ventured to rise and attack the minister.5 It was the first of the great attacks on Peel that Disraeli launched during this dramatic session. It was probably the most important speech he had made so far, for it helped to galvanize the opposition to Peel in his own party that five months later was to bring him down. It was delivered in the impassive monotone,

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laced with sarcasm and wit, that Disraeli had made his own. He had taught himself to be sparing in gesture and had long abandoned his former flamboyance of dress. When not speaking, but listening, he did not, like many members, keep on his hat, for he did not need it to hide his facial expressions. He sat imperturbable, like a statue, with his arms folded. His sallies were carefully thought out and rehearsed, but left an impression of spontaneity. His manner belied the underlying emotion that bore him along and that he was able to transfer to many in his audience. In a characteristic passage he said: what I cannot endure is to hear a man come down, and say: 'I will rule without respect to party, though I rose by party; and I care not for your judgment, for I look to posterity.' Sir, very few people reach posterity. And who amongst us may arrive at that destination I presume not to vaticinate. Posterity is a most limited assembly.6 Peel had been listened to in silence and when he sat down the only cheers came from in front of him. Disraeli's speech was punctuated by laughter and applause and when he sat down the cheers from the Conservative benches were thunderous. John Blackwood, the owner of the magazine bearing his name, was present and commented: 'nothing could more completely prove the prostration of the Conservative and Agricultural party than such a swab as Disraeli being the first to rise from among them'.7 Even so it was not Disraeli who made this revolt so much more significant, organized and enduring than the previous Tory rebellions against Peel. This time there was organized opposition in the constituencies; in fact this was the first major occasion since 1832 when extra-parliamentary opinion exerted such direct pressure on members elected on a party ticket. For at least three years agricultural protection societies had been active in rural constituencies in reaction against the campaign of the Anti-Corn Law League. This movement, popularly known as the AntiLeague, was brought together in February 1844 into a Central Agricultural Protection Society, under the Dukes of Richmond and Buckingham, Disraeli's old patron. The Anti-League provided the organizational stiffening for the opposition to Peel's policy. Peel's course, sensible and rational, was caught in the crossfire between two movements that elevated a pragmatic question into a great clash of ideology and class interest. Also important was the fact that the opposition to repeal found an

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acceptable leader in Lord George Bentinck, second son of the 4th Duke of Portland. He was a nephew of Canning and his private secretary before entering the House in 1827. He hardly ever spoke. He was a Canningite Tory, then a supporter of Grey, whose ministry he was asked to join but refused. He came back to the Tories in the same move that also brought Stanley over after 1834. In outlook he was a Whig of the Glorious Revolution, strongly anticlerical and a believer in religious toleration. He supported Catholic Emancipation and salaries for Irish Catholic priests. Up to 1846 all this mattered little, for his main interest was the turf.8 His cousin Greville, the diarist, called him 'the leviathan of the turf. Bentinck divided the world into friends and enemies and he pursued with violent hatred anyone who disagreed with him. He became well-known for his exposure of racing fraud, but it seems that he was himself not above shady dealings. His expenditure on racing exceeded his income in many years and he could only make ends meet by successful betting. This required close study of form and odds. The ability with which he handled economic statistics in the repeal debates owed something to the excellent memory for figures he had acquired in racing. Living dangerously from the financial point of view must have formed a bond between him and Disraeli. The trust and friendship that grew up between these two men became a factor in making the protectionist party a going concern. It is often said that Disraeli was better in developing close relationships with women than with men, but the example of Bentinck, and the earlier friendships with Bulwer and D'Orsay, show that he could bond with men, not only with those who were younger and for whom he was a mentor, but also with some who were his equals or seniors in age. The first moves in organizing the protectionists and the association of Bentinck with these efforts had occurred before the assembly of parliament and before Disraeli and Bentinck had ever met. Once Peel had set out his full scheme on 27 January 1846 battle was seriously joined. A number of Tories who were converts to free trade, including Lord Ashley, resigned their seats and by-elections were thus precipitated. In what were mainly county seats the protectionists won in sixteen and lost in only eight. This evidence of grass-roots sentiment provided a further boost for the emerging protectionist party in parliament. It was those farming on a smaller scale, squires and tenant farmers, who felt most vulnerable to free trade, while a number of well-known large

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landowners continued to support Peel. When on 9 February a motion was moved to go into committee to consider the corn laws a protectionist amendment prolonged the debate for twelve days. A small group of leading protectionists, including Disraeli, co-ordinated tactics. He himself made his second major speech on 20 February. He rehearsed the arguments he had often made before, in favour of moderate protection, but freer trade, the Pitt system later sustained by Liverpool, Huskisson and Peel himself. But now the government was proposing to adopt complete free trade, the principles of 'the school of Manchester'.9 It was probably the first time that this phrase, which has entered the language, was used. He made a strong case for special treatment for agriculture as part of the territorial constitution. 'English exceptionalism', the belief that England is like no other nation and can only fulfil her unique mission if she remains special, was central to Disraeli's argument. He was now sufficiently prominent to have his speech featuring, alongside that of Peel, in a Times leader. The paper, by now under the editorship of Delane, had supported Peel's moderate protectionism, but was now in favour of repeal. The Times commented on Disraeli's speech: He has taken refuge in a dream of political heroism. ... A science usually treated in its relation to facts he has sublimated into high moral philosophy. ... Party is the embodiment of public opinion; an intellectual as well as a personal attachment; a system as well as a society. ... In accordance with this simple and romantic view of the question, Mr Disraeli has devoted himself to the ear and memory of the expiring protectionist body. ... Leaving the forward path of human affairs to more vulgar minds, he is resigned to the tender and self-denying duties of political retrospection.10 At the end of this debate, on 27 February, Lord George Bentinck made his first big speech as acknowledged, though not formal leader of the protectionists. He was so unsure of his ability as a speaker that he had thought of hiring a lawyer in the House to put the case for him. He was persuaded by Disraeli that he had to do the job himself. At the end of his speech Bentinck referred to the fact that Prince Albert had appeared in the gallery to listen to the prime minister earlier in the debate, apparently registering the support of the queen and the court for the government. The prince had been, Bentinck declared, ill-advised 'to give

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semblance of the personal sanction of Her Majesty to a measure which ... a great majority of the landed aristocracy ... imagine fraught with deep injury if not ruin to them. .. .' 11 Bentinck probably shared the contempt, common among the Whig high aristocracy, for the minor German princelings populating the British royal family. At the end of this debate the protectionist delaying amendment was rejected by 97 votes. But only 112 Tories voted for the government and more than twice as many against it. Forty of the 112 were office-holders. In April Bentinck with reluctance accepted the formal leadership of the protectionist party. Stanley was emerging as the protectionist leader in the Lords. It was becoming clear that Peel was holding office only by grace of the Whigs and Radicals. Once corn law repeal had been enacted with their support, an issue was bound to arise on which he would fall. The more Peel was crucified in the Commons by the protectionists, Disraeli foremost among them, the higher his stock rose outside parliament. Disraeli did not make another major speech in the House until May, but he was involved in efforts to bring about some kind of junction between protectionists and moderate Whigs as the basis for a new government. Palmerston would have been a central figure in any such arrangement. In a speech at the end of March he had declared in favour of a moderate fixed duty on corn for revenue purposes only. Disraeli had congratulated him on the speech, saying, 'The "boobies" on both sides were quite mystified. I sate among yours, & their running commentary was infinitely diverting.'12 Disraeli and Palmerston had politically and personally much in common. Disraeli's willingness to contemplate coalition with the Whigs, or even a section of them, casts doubt on his talk about the importance of party and party loyalty and even relativizes his long-standing hostility to Whiggism. The final clash between Disraeli and Peel came at the end of the third reading of the Repeal Bill on 15 May. Disraeli made a long speech arguing the case for moderate protection and pointing out the weaknesses in the case of the all-out free traders like Cobden, namely that it was an illusion that all countries would tamely follow their example. He finished up with a strong attack on Peel. The prime minister was not guilty of long-meditated treachery but 'his life has been a great appropriation clause. He is a burglar of others' intellect ... there is no statesman who has committed petty larcency on so great a scale.' Perhaps conscious of the popularity of repeal out of doors, he gave a warning:

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I know that the public mind is polluted with economic fancies - a depraved desire that the rich may become richer without the interference of industry and toil ... it may be idle now in the springtide of their economic frenzy, to warn them that there may be an ebb of trouble. ... Then ... they may remember ... those who, betrayed and deserted, were neither ashamed nor afraid to struggle for the 'good old cause' - the cause with which are associated the principles the most popular, sentiments the most entirely national, the cause of labour, the cause of the people, the cause of England!13 Disraeli sat down to tumultuous cheers. Peel, winding up the debate, found it difficult to make himself heard against the hoots and screams of the protectionists. At one point he almost broke down and had tears in his eyes. This time he did directly reply to Disraeli. Peel said; 'if he [Disraeli] then entertained the opinion of me which he now professes ... it is a little surprising that in the spring of 1841 ... he was prepared to give me his confidence. It is still more surprising that he should have been ready ... to unite his fortunes with mine in office. . . ,'14 Disraeli was ill-advised to get up in his turn to deny that he had been an applicant for office in 1841 and he was lucky that Peel did not read out the letter he had then written. It is true that Disraeli's letter of 5 September 1841 did not directly ask for office, only 'to save him from an intolerable humiliation', and was written after most offices had been allocated, but it undoubtedly expresses a wish for office. It is an example of Disraeli sailing close to the wind, something that had become second nature to him in his long years of warding off his creditors. The protectionists failed to stop repeal, but they could take their revenge on Peel. An Irish Coercion Bill, one of the many in the nineteenth century, had been introduced early in the session and had then been supported by most of the House, excluding only the Irish followers of O'Connell. The government had allowed the bill to languish and to become entwined with the legislation to repeal the corn laws. Bentinck made a violent attack on Peel's integrity, when he claimed that the prime minister had already privately changed his mind over Catholic Emancipation in 1825, yet had 'chased and hunted an illustrious relative of mine [Canning] to death' because of Canning's support for emancipation.15 Disraeli tried as best he could to

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come to the assistance of his intemperate friend. The queen's comment to Peel on this incident was that the Commons 'ought to be ashamed of having such Members as Lord G. Bentinck & that detestable Mr D'Israeli'.16 Within two hours of the Commons being informed that repeal had passed the Lords, the government was defeated on the Irish Coercion Bill by a majority of 73. This time only 74 protectionists voted with Bentinck and Disraeli, over one hundred went back to Peel and about fifty abstained. This perhaps better than anything indicates that without the relentless harrying tactics against Peel carried out above all by Bentinck and Disraeli, a permanent protectionist Tory party would not have come into existence. Even now it was by no means certain that it would stay in existence. Disraeli had become a major player on the political stage and to Mary Anne he displayed his jaunty self when the news of Peel's resignation broke at the Carlton: 'All "Coningsby" & "Young England" the general exclamation here,'17 but in his own, fatalistic inner self he must have realized that his future was as inscrutable as ever. Even among the protectionists he was seen as a cheer leader rather than as a real leader. The immediate outcome of the crisis was the formation of a purely Whig government by Lord John Russell, which did not include any Peelites but received their support. Peel's priority was now to prevent any return to protection and therefore to keep the protectionists out of office, while the hatred of the protectionists for Peel was such that they preferred to keep Russell in rather than run any risk of Peel returning. Palmerston joined Russell in a government now firmly committed to free trade. In the remaining few weeks of the parliamentary session Russell asserted his commitment to free trade by dealing with the sugar duties, the issue that had led to the defeat of the Whigs in 1841 and had produced one of the back-bench rebellions against Peel in 1844. Writing in his biography of Bentinck a few years later Disraeli mused, 'Strange that a manufacture which charms infancy and soothes old age should so frequently occasion political disaster'.18 In the debate Disraeli spoke as a 'follower of Lord George Bentinck' and in a typically broad and exaggerated sweep declared: The history of England is a history of reaction. We destroyed, for example, our church establishment and we replaced it. We destroyed our ancient monarchy and we

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restored it. We destroyed the House of Lords, and yet we were now obliged to take up our bills for them for their sanction. We even abolished the House of Commons, and yet here we were at the end of the session debating a great question.19 Walter Bagehot was probably right when many years later he attributed Disraeli's rise 'to his very unusual capacity for applying a literary genius, in itself limited, to the practical purposes of public life'.20 Disraeli was, however, not being disingenuous or unduly modest when, in a letter to a former Tory MP, he described the uncertain political outlook without saying anything about his own future role. Peel, he thought, who could have established 'a political dynasty as long as that of the Walpoles, Pelhams & Grenvilles', could not now rally. 'He has no party, & verging on 60!' We, meaning the protectionists, had no wish to disturb the present government, which on an immediate dissolution might win by 25 or 30, but would then be in the same difficulty as Melbourne in 1837. 'It will require some time before our party is re-organised on a comprehensive basis & before the confidence in public men is sufficiently restored to make the country in general exert itself for any leaders.' The emergence of George Bentinck 'is a parliamentary phenomenon' and he could 'make a rhetorician sufficiently practised to lead a government; if no other man be found. Some think Gladstone, fortunately for himself out of parliamt. is to be the future leader of the Tory party, & that we are all to rally under his banner, leaving Peel stranded. ...' In a later addition to the letter he wrote that the Whigs would not dissolve this year: 'They have no cry in the country, & their only strength is the utter disorganisation of the Tories'.21 In the winter of 1846 Disraeli returned to literature. He finished the third volume of his trilogy, Tancred, from which he had been distracted by the drama of the repeal battle. It was not a book designed to improve his political prospects. In the general preface to the 1870 edition of his novels, a manifesto proclaiming his consistency over a long life, he claimed that while in Coningsby he had dealt with the derivation and character of political parties, in Sybil with the condition of the people, in Tancred he was writing of the duties of the Church as a 'main remedial agency in our present state'. It is also the most complete exposition to date of his view that Christianity is completed

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Judaism. Tancred, the only child of the Duke of Bellamont, rather than enter the House of Commons, goes on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to sort out his faith. Here, in the Garden of Gethsemane, he meets a beautiful Jewess, a stock figure in Victorian fiction. Eva Bello reveals to him that she does not worship Jesus and Mary, but that she is of the same race as they were. Eva tells Tancred: 'The human race is saved; and without the apparent agency of a Hebrew prince, it could not have been saved. Now tell me: suppose the Jews had not prevailed upon the Romans to crucify Jesus, what would have come of the Atonement?'22 Disraeli repeats and expands on his view that race is the great driving force of history and explains the rise and fall of empires. Sidonia reappears and Fakredeen, the emir of Lebanon, has some characteristics that suggest Disraeli himself, what he wanted to be and what he feared he really was: He became habituated to the idea that everything could be achieved by dexterity, and that there was no test of conduct except success. To dissemble and to simulate; to conduct confidential negotiations with contending powers and parties at the same time; to be ready to adopt any opinion and to possess none; to fall into the public humour of the moment, and to evade the impending catastrophe; to look upon every man as a tool, and never to do anything which had not a definite though circuitous purpose ... Yet there is another side to Fakredeen: Though he intended to make a person his tool, and often succeeded, such was his susceptibility, and so strong were his sympathetic qualities, that he was perpetually, without being aware of it, showing his cards. ... Recklessness with him was a principle of action. He trusted always to his fertile expedients if he failed, and ran the risk in the meanwhile of paramount success, the fortune of those who are entitled to be rash.23 The writing of Tancred must have been a catharsis for the author. He needed to get the recent parliamentary drama and his own role in it into perspective. He felt much superior to the many political busybodies milling around him, yet his reputation as a Jewish adventurer imposed a kind of glass ceiling upon him. He therefore reinvented his Jewish identity into a badge of ancient lineage and a gift of unique religious insight.

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For the remainder of the session after the formation of the Russell government the protectionists had remained on the same side of the House as the new government. At the beginning of the 1847 session they moved to the opposition side. Bentinck and Disraeli sat on the front bench, some distance from Peel, with whose followers they now shared the opposition. Disraeli was to remain on the front bench until his elevation to the peerage in 1876. His preoccupation with Tancred had not prevented him from keeping a weather eye on the political scene. In early December George Bentinck came to stay at Bradenham. He had not only become a friend, he was also the man with whom Disraeli's political future was inextricably linked. Bentinck was the most uncompromising opponent of Conservative reunion and, together with Disraeli, also the most obvious stumbling block to it among the protectionists. Many others were still seeing such a reunion as the most natural way forward. Lyndhurst had already exerted himself in the cause and, more importantly, it remained a preferred option for Stanley, who was universally acknowledged as the overall leader of the Conservative rump. Disraeli was well aware that 'the conservative rancor flourishes in all its primal virulence and vigor', making reunion difficult; in his mind there was also still the other option that had been canvassed during the crisis, a fusion with the moderate Whigs. To secure his own position Disraeli also had to make sure of retaining his place in the Commons and there were indications that Shrewsbury might not be a safe seat for him. It would be an obvious advantage for someone playing a leading role in the country party to sit for a safe county seat and for Disraeli it would counteract the image of the Jewish adventurer. His long-standing links with and fondness for Buckinghamshire made it the obvious county seat to aspire to, but he needed to become a county landowner at least on a modest scale, something he had often dreamed of in the past. During Lord George's visit to Bradenham there were discussions on how the Bentinck family might help him to acquire Hughenden Manor, a property that had just come on the market. He needed mortgage facilities, for Mary Anne's money was already too heavily encumbered with his debts. Some help was given by Isaac and his death in January 1848 put Benjamin in possession of his inheritance. There had to be much playing for time until the money was raised and the deal for Hughenden could be clinched. The Disraelis could not move into the house

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until December 1848 and in the meantime he had been returned unopposed as one of three county members for Buckinghamshire in the general election of July 1847. In the final negotiations with the Bentincks, in October 1848, when Lord George had just died, he told them 'it would be no object to them and no pleasure to me unless I played the high game in public life; and that I could not do that without being on a rock'.24 These moves, by which Disraeli became a country squire by grace of one of the great Whig families of 1688, have always intrigued the observers of Disraeli's career, but sometimes too much is read into what at the time seemed a reasonable arrangement. The safe and usually uncontested Buckinghamshire seat did give Disraeli a rock upon which to base his political career. His position as a county member was appropriately underpinned by the possession of Hughenden, which also gave him an enviable background for his private life. At the beginning of the 1847 parliamentary session his metamorphosis into a country gentleman was still under negotiation, but his assumption of the gravitas of a statesman was well under way. A provincial journal noted that he had exchanged the 'motley-coloured garments' he had still worn the previous August into a suit of black 'unapproachably perfect' and 'he appears to have doffed the vanity of the coxcomb with the plumage of the peacock'.25 The full horror of the Irish famine had now struck and Russell was floundering in his attempts to deal with it. Bentinck, with Disraeli's full support, put forward a scheme for railway construction in Ireland, designed to provide large-scale employment. It was opposed by the government on economy grounds and on a vote only 118 members supported it. The weakness of the protectionist party and of Bentinck's leadership was painfully obvious. There were other embarrassing incidents. During one of his onslaughts on the government Bentinck was likened to 'a wild animal at feeding time', his voice raised to screaming pitch, his eyes gleaming, 'and his whole deportment ... so excited that no man out of Bedlam ever came near it'.26 Even his own supporters sat silent. Yet Bentinck's irreconcilable fury was echoed outside parliament and this cauldron of resentment and confusion was working to Disraeli's advantage. When the election at last came in July 1847 all efforts at a Conservative reunion had come to nought. They had originated mainly in the House of Lords, where the animosities had never

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been so violent. The Irish famine and bad harvests throughout Europe, an important element in the social unrest that produced the revolutions of the following year, had kept agricultural commodity prices high. This made protection a less urgent issue and its place was taken for anti-Peelite Tories by the 'no popery' cry. The Maynooth Grant was well remembered and many of the leading Peelites were suspect as Puseyites. Disraeli's election address, which now had more than local significance, made much of his consistent support for the territorial constitution, which required 'the maintenance of the agricultural industry', but it also denied any intention to 'factiously and forcibly repeal the measures of 1846'.27 He reiterated his support for popular against liberal principles, for decentralization and local selfgovernment and his concern for the condition of the working classes. The result of the election was difficult to assess. There were only ten seats where the two Tory factions were pitted against each other and most were won by Peelites. Some put the number of Peelites returned as high as 120, others as low as 60. There were around 230 protectionists and about 335 supporters of Russell. Together the two Conservative groups had lost about 50 seats. The weak Russell government, itself riven by faction, would continue in office. The election immediately raised a divisive issue for the protectionists, the return of Disraeli's friend Lionel de Rothschild for the City of London. It was the famous 'Jew Question', whether a Jew would be allowed to dispense with the words 'on the true faith of a Christian' in the parliamentary oath. Both Bentinck and Disraeli were in favour of the removal of Jewish disabilities, though for different reasons. Disraeli held the view that Christianity was completed Judaism, which he had set out in the trilogy and most recently in Tancred. As he was to put it in the debate in December 1847: 'Yes it is as a Christian that I will not take upon me the awful responsibility of excluding from the legislature those who are of the religion in the bosom of which my Lord and Saviour was born.'28 Bentinck's pro-Jew position was based on the much more orthodox ground of religious toleration, as befitted a member of one of the Whig families of 1688. Stanley tried to persuade him to record a silent vote for Russell's motion for a select committee on removing Jewish disabilities, but he chose to mount a full-scale attack on religious bigotry. In consequence he was informed by William Beresford, one of the two protectionist whips, that he had lost the

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confidence of the party and 'being much too proud to wait to be cashiered' he resigned the leadership. The position of the protectionists was more than ever parlous. There was not even agreement on the name. When Beresford at the beginning of the 1848 session used the name 'Conservative' in a circular, some were indignant. Out of doors there was well-organized militant Protestantism, centred in the National Clubs and represented in the press by the Morning Herald and by Samuel Phillips, himself a converted Jew and at times a virulent enemy of Disraeli. Yet in the House Bentinck and Disraeli were not the only leading figures who had voted for the Jew bill and were disgusted by the intolerance of violent anti-Catholicism. Stanley, a former Whig, had in the past supported the removal of Jewish disabilities, but he now chose to lie low on this issue. But contrary to Bentinck's own gloomy assessment, the Peelites were not in much better shape, for Peel himself adamantly refused to organize a party, though his personal prestige remained high. Russell and his government were also in deep trouble, mainly owing to the severe financial crisis that had burst in the autumn of 1847. Peel's Bank Charter Act of 1844 came under fire, especially from the protectionists. Russell might fall at any time and in December the queen expressed alarm at the suggestion that events might bring Bentinck and Disraeli into high office. When parliament reassembled in February 1848 Bentinck withdrew from the front bench, making it clear that he had no intention of resuming the leadership. He advised Disraeli to stay on the front bench to avoid too obvious an impression of a split. Lord Granby, elder brother of Lord John Manners, became an agreed compromise candidate for the leadership, but he resigned after barely a month. For the rest of the session there was no formal leader and the two whips, Newdegate and Beresford, acted directly with Stanley in the upper house. Manners in a letter to Disraeli described Newdegate as 'a most honest, excellent, mulish prig of a bigot' and he remained a most committed and eccentric anti-Catholic throughout his parliamentary career. Of Beresford Disraeli wrote to Manners: 'I have always shrunk from him: he appeared to me coarse and commonplace, not a man of much moyens: more rapacious than ambitious, and rather cunning than shrewd: but he has vigor, tho' deficient in tact.'29 Beresford remained antagonistic to any pretensions of Disraeli's, but there was a smaller group of Bentinck-Dizzy loyalists within the wider party managed by Beresford and

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Newdegate under the eye of Stanley. Disraeli was not at this stage seriously considered as a leader, but he could exploit the confused situation to his advantage. He and Bentinck made quite a good job of opposing the government, when nobody else among the protectionists could do so, and were seen by many as the de facto leaders of the opposition. One of the most noteworthy among the many speeches made by Disraeli during the session was in opposition to a motion by Joseph Hume on parliamentary reform. Whatever his earlier or later views on the question he had to oppose the motion. In arguing that the vote was a privilege and not a right he came rather close to endorsing female suffrage. If the vote was a right, then why should not women have it, in a country ruled by a woman? Later in the speech he attacked professional agitators, the people who were always agitating questions like parliamentary reform when there was no real demand for it, in terms that sound very modern: The business of this profession [professional agitation] is to discover or invent great questions. When a great question is settled, it is the ruin of the profession. There is no need of a chairman ... there are no committees to be attended; no pamphlets to be written. ... The rule, however, is, when a great question is settled, immediately look out for a new one.30 In July the Disraelis gave a dinner at Grosvenor Gate ostensibly designed to reconcile Bentinck and Stanley, but indicating even more clearly that Stanley no longer harboured his old suspicions against Disraeli. Stanley was glad to go along with Bentinck's suggestion, or may even have originated it, that Disraeli should sum up for the protectionists at the end of the session on 30 August. It was a splendid opportunity for Disraeli to make the wide-ranging, often philosophical speech at which he excelled. It contained ironical sallies against ministers reminiscent of his attacks on Peel. He pinned the blame for 'sedition in England, insurrection in Ireland, and revolution in Europe' on the government and in his peroration reverted to his theme 'the disorganization of parties' as the root of all evils. Late in life he would still remark of this speech that it made him leader.31 It was a year of high drama, with continental thrones toppling like ninepins before the revolutionary wave. In a letter to Lady Londonderry Disraeli wrote: 'The King of France in a Surrey villa, Metternich in a Hanover Square hotel, & the Prince

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of Prussia at Lady Palmerstons! ... Kings & Princes are turned off as we turn away servants - worse, without a character. ... Fifty mad professors at Frankfort, calling themselves a Diet... '32 It was typical for him to put much of the blame for the revolutions on to the machinations of secret societies. A long and emotional meeting with the exiled Louis Philippe had convinced Disraeli that 'the secret societies, seeing everything in confusion & that everybody had lost their head, resolved to make an impromptu dash, & clutch the prize'. Later he wrote in his biography of Lord George Bentinck: 'The two characteristics of these confederations, which now cover Europe like net-work, are war against property and hatred of Semitic revelation. ...' The continental revolutions stretched nerves over domestic tensions the Chartist upsurge, the agricultural depression and the perpetual Irish malaise - to breaking point. The political kaleidoscope was given another unexpected jolt when Bentinck died suddenly of a heart attack on 21 September, at the age of 46. Disraeli was grief-stricken. Rather sooner than he might have hoped, given the uncertainty of his own position, the leadership question took an acute turn. Throughout the autumn and winter there was speculation in private and in the press and much intrigue. There was much that stood in the way of a formal recognition of Disraeli as leader, not only the absence of a great aristocratic position and the general distrust surrounding him, but also the barrier he would constitute to the remaining hopes of reuniting Peelites and Protectionists. On the other hand he stood head and shoulders above all others in the protectionst group, one can hardly call it party, in the House of Commons. One way out was to find a way of covering Disraeli's de facto leadership with a fig leaf, to find, as a newspaper article put it, someone for the role of 'prime puppet in the dizzy show'. Stanley's first proposal, in a long 'flummery' letter, was that J.C. Herries should fill this role. He was a Tory ex-minister surviving from Peel's first government of 1834, now over 70. Disraeli in his reply turning down this suggestion made a thinly veiled threat that he would cause trouble from the back benches: 'it is my opinion, however erroneous ... that I should have better opportunities of reviving the spirit ... among our friends throughout the country, by acting alone & unshackled, than if I fell into the party discipline, wh: you intimate'.33 In any case Herries refused on grounds of health. Disraeli had to be careful not to overplay his hand or give too obvious an impression of

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intrigue. Beresford, the whip who had argued that Disraeli as leader was impossible, was perhaps beginning to sense which way the wind was blowing and wrote to Stanley: 'If the Party choose to be led by him and agree to that generally, I do not say unanimously, I shall not be found as one creating disunion. But I must say I am not prepared to yield to an intrigue. .. ,'34 Newdegate, the other whip, was more positive that Disraeli was not acceptable, that with him as leader he would whip to empty benches, and within eighteen months he resigned. Disraeli consulted widely and had many feelers out. One of those whose advice he took very seriously was Metternich, of whom he now conceived a high opinion. In a letter to Metternich Disraeli says: I will not undertake the burthen of debate in a subordinate position, because the inevitable & humiliating inference from such conduct on my part, would be, that I was a man fit to be used, but not to be trusted. The very fact that I am not an aristocrat renders it, to my mind, still more necessary that my position should be assured, & my character enforced and sustained; to increase my influence in a struggle where I have, at the same time, to watch the Whigs, check Sir Robert Peel, & beat back the revolutionary waves of the Manchester School.35 The fallen Austrian chancellor was above all interested that there should a strong 'constructive' party opposing the 'destructive', the Radicals of the Manchester School, and expressed confidence that Disraeli would uphold the conservative cause. It was no coincidence that the memoir of Isaac Disraeli by his son had just been published, in which the family is endowed with a line of descent from some of the most aristocratic Jewish families of the Iberian peninsula. Whatever he admitted to Metternich in private, Disraeli wanted the world to think that his lineage was ancient and distinguished. Finally Stanley came up with the proposal that a committee of three should exercise the leadership, Herries, Granby and Disraeli. According to Stanley's son Disraeli again demurred, saying 'I am Disraeli the adventurer and I will not acquiesce in a position which will enable the party to make use of me in debate and then throw me aside.'36 In fact Disraeli acquiesced in the committee, but even in the debate on the address a few days later he, with Stanley's concurrence, took the lead. By March Stanley was telling him that if the party came into office he must be chief

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minister in the Commons. The last vestiges of the committee disappeared when Granby resigned in November 1851. Disraeli was, as he wrote to his sister on 22 February 1849, 'after much struggling ... fairly the leader'.37 It was a fairy tale come true, but there was a price to pay. He had come to the top by using his literary-journalistic and histrionic talents in the parliamentary arena. These talents had shone at their brightest when he had the freedom of an independent member. He was at his best as a polemicist; he painted in strong colours, revealing but not necessarily true to life. Now he had to exchange this for a diet of carefully worded statements, of blue books and economic statistics. There loomed a life of being tied to his seat on the front bench for at least half the year. He had to lead men for many of whom he had little respect. He had played the party card against Peel, but his acceptance as leader rested on the open and veiled threat that he would otherwise reassume his independence. The break-up of Peel's party had at a stroke removed virtually all potential competitors from his path, but left a rump with an uncertain future, scarcely a potential base for government. In his novels he might write of a territorial constitution, under which an aristocracy had a bond with the masses, presided over by a monarchy inspiring universal loyalty and with a Church serving as a spiritual guide for the whole polity. In practice the masses had no votes, the middle classes left much of the business of government to the aristocracy as long as they were prosperous. Utility and political economy, profoundly uncongenial to Disraeli, dominated the spirit of the age. Even the monarchy, at least during Albert's lifetime, was liberal and unfriendly to Derby and Disraeli. The Church was deeply riven by faction. But fortunately for him, matters were not as clear-cut as they can easily be depicted in retrospect. The electoral outcomes were always very narrowly balanced and in parliament sudden squalls of controversy and emotion could transform the scene in a twinkling. Disraeli's capture of the leadership turned into a sentence of years of hard and frustrating labour, but this was no foregone conclusion.

5 Towards office 1849-1852

Disraeli was scarcely in the saddle as leader of the protectionists in the Commons when he embarked upon a difficult and tortuous campaign to wean the party from protection. He himself had never been a dogmatic protectionist and he is reported to have said to Palmerston on one occasion: 'Search my speeches through, and you will not find one word of Protection in them.'1 Reciprocity was the principle he consistently advocated. It would safeguard the interests of domestic and colonial producers and, as he argued in the debates on the repeal of the Navigation Acts in 1848 and 1849, the maritime pre-eminence of Britain. A return to protection in the corn trade was clearly impossible in the 1847 parliament, but there was a more important argument against it. The repeal of the corn laws had initiated a new social compact between town and country, between agriculture and manufacture, and above all between classes. It was widely thought that Britain had been the one major country in Europe to escape revolution in 1848, because the fiscal settlement introduced by Peel had created a greater sense of fairness in society. Fear of revolution was pervasive and Disraeli fully shared it. In Sybil he describes 'the Hell-cats of Wodgate' on the rampage, a terrifying mob offering 'fifty pounds for a live policeman'. When news of the European revolutions broke in March 1848 he wrote of 'times of unprecedented horrors! I know not whether I am standing on my head or my heels'.2 Most people, the queen and Prince Albert among them, thought that if the protectionists, with Stanley and Disraeli in the lead, returned to office, England would lapse into revolution. Disraeli was determined to make his party look more like a potential government. At the beginning of the 1849 session he proposed a motion to bring relief to the agricultural interest by

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moving half the local rates on to central exchequer. He warned that if the Manchester School had their way and England became the workshop of the world, allowing agriculture to wither, then 'you, too, should fade like the Tyrian dye, and moulder like the Venetian palaces' and added 'I wish to see the agriculture, the commerce, and the manufactures of England, not adversaries, but co-mates and partners - rivals only in the ardour of their patriotism and in the activity of their public spirit.'3 There was more in similar vein later in the session, but Disraeli's oratory could do little against the determination of the Peelites to keep Russell in office. He complained to Lord John Manners, still without a seat, about the lack of talent in the party to support him. He told Manners that 'he kept down Bankes, Miles ... Newdegate, & all that old rubbish, & gave a list to the Speaker of men to bring forward. ... They funked & the Speaker was obliged to call Miles & Newdegate who were always on their legs & who were the very men I wished to be silent - Miles speaking of nothing but Butchers meat & Newdegate anathematising imports under any cir[cumstan]ces. Alas! Alas! an army without officers!'4 It was, however, just this lack of officer material that kept Disraeli in his precarious eminence. When parliament went into recess at the end of August 1849 Disraeli was for the first time able to retreat to the peace and quiet of Hughenden, but it was neither politically nor privately a happy time for him. He hatched a more comprehensive plan of compensations for the landed interest. To the earlier proposal of transferring local rates to central taxation he added a plan for creating a budget surplus to establish a sinking fund. This would be used to liquidate national debt and thereby reduce interest rates. It would help farmers and landowners, many of them heavily mortgaged and as dependent on rates of interest as the heavily indebted Disraeli himself. It was not a fully thought out scheme and owed much to the eccentric banker Henry Drummond. Disraeli went public with it in a speech at Aylesbury in September 1849. Someone with administrative and executive experience would have seen that it required further consultation and Stanley was quick to point out the flaws in it. To get out of this 'scrape' Disraeli in another speech in Essex put more emphasis on his intention to equalize the tax burden on land with that on other property. Almost immediately another squall blew up. Unfortunately for Disraeli this was just the moment when there was a strong revival of the demand for an import duty on

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corn. Immediately after the repeal of the corn laws agricultural commodity prices had remained high, but from 1849 to 1852 British agriculture passed through its most severe depression since 1815. Poor English harvests were accompanied by abundant European ones, corn prices were low, and free trade seemed to be the culprit. Agriculture was the one sector not sharing in the rising national prosperity. In May 1849 a National Association for the Protection of British Industry and Capital was launched, bringing together opponents of free trade in agriculture, shipping and even manufacture. Many leading members of the Conservative party, such as the Duke of Richmond and Lord Malmesbury, were associated with it. The moving spirit was George Frederick Young, a wealthy owner of shipyards and ardent protectionist. He wrote quite a deferential letter to Disraeli suggesting a strategy meeting to advance the cause of protection, but opposing partial relief measures such as those proposed by Disraeli in the Aylesbury and Essex speeches. Disraeli reacted strongly in a letter, which he had immediately printed. He said that in his view the protectionist party could not expect to obtain a majority in the immediate general election demanded by the National Association. He went on: The political situation appears to be this: Unless the agricultural constituencies (county & borough) are prevented from running a-muck against the financial system of this country, wh:, out of suffering & sheer spite & vexation, it is not unnatural they should do, it is all over with England as a great, free, monarchy; & it must become, not only, in its imitation of the Un: States, a second-rate republic, but a second-rate & manufacturing republic.5 It was ill-advised language to use in public. Stanley now wrote him a long, remonstrative letter, repudiating the opinion that protection was a hopeless cause.6 Disraeli, however justified he was in his view that protection was a millstone round the neck of the party, had again shown poor judgement about immediate political prospects. There was a positive side to Disraeli's willingness to explore all manner of ways of compensating the agricultural sector for the abandonment of protection, from a reduction of malt tax to a differentiation of the income tax. He did not allow himself to be daunted by conventional wisdom and his fertile imagination made short shrift of obstacles that would loom large in more bureaucratically experienced minds.

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Beresford, of whom Disraeli was rightly suspicious, had earlier in the autumn reassured Stanley. After a visit to Hughenden Beresford had written: He is reading up all the Blue Books of the past session. ... He strikes me as very zealous in the cause, and as feeling himself completely embarked now with us, and I do trust that he is fully compromised and will remain true. He certainly has great powers, and not the least among them is the great command he has evidently over himself and his own feelings and passions.7 But was this really reassuring and did it display much trust in one who was now claiming to be the leader? In the reminiscences he committed to paper in the 1860s, Disraeli described his relations with Stanley during the whole of 1849 as uneasy and in 1850 as lacking 'confidential intimacy'.8 But it was the beginning of the longest symbiotic relationship in Victorian politics. In contemporary parlance it was 'the Jew and the Jockey', 'the Derby and the Hoax'. Later historians allowed Disraeli completely to overshadow the 14th Earl of Derby, as Stanley was about to become on the death of his father in 1851. More recently the balance has been tilted perhaps too much the other way. Both were so intelligent that mutual respect soon grew, but never close friendship. Derby needed Disraeli and the thought of his becoming a loose cannon in the lower house did not bear contemplation. Even the barrier Disraeli posed to combinations and coalitions with other groups, such as the Peelites, could be turned to advantage, for such combinations might have led to the relegation of both of them. The two men were very dissimilar. Politics became the one great game for Disraeli, but there were other distractions for Derby. Like Bentinck, he loved racing and could be seen in the betting room at Newmarket 'in the midst of a crowd of blacklegs, betters, and loose characters of every description, in uproarious spirits, chaffing, rowing, shouting with laughter and joking. .. .'9 Derby's detached attitude was easier to maintain in the upper than in the lower house. For Disraeli it became a sore trial and essentially at odds with his view of the role of the opposition. In 1849, his first parliamentary session as de facto leader, Disraeli's private life was also beset with difficulties. His financial situation was again under pressure, because his public prominence had brought some old creditors out of the woodwork.

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There are some hints that all was not well with the Disraeli marriage. Mary Anne was often unwell, perhaps hysterical and menopausal, but certainly intensely jealous and possessive. In July 1849 she forced his private locks at Grosvenor Gate and made him spend a night in a hotel. She did not find anything incriminating, but in a letter to his sister, long suppressed, there is the phrase 'it might have been otherwise'.10 It is possible that Disraeli had an affair at this time; Mary Anne's jealousy may have been aroused by Lady Londonderry, with whom her husband's friendship had become close again. This rather insufferable grande dame regarded Disraeli as political hot property, but was still reluctant to receive Mary Anne, who in her eyes was irremediably common. Lord Londonderry was one of the busybodies trying to bring about a reconciliation between protectionists and Peelites. Holed up at Hughenden with Mary Anne and assailed by political tribulations Benjamin wrote to Sarah on 4 November: I am not physically ill - but hipped & dispirited beyond expression. Indeed I find this life quite intolerable - & wish some earthquake would happen, or something else of a very decided nature occur, that wd produce a great change.11 In the new year, 1850, things began to look up for him. After a full-scale debate on agricultural distress initiated by Disraeli in February 1850 the government's majority was reduced to twenty-one and the Peelites had shown themselves to be seriously divided, more than half of them, including Gladstone, supporting the protectionists. Then Disraeli fell ill with a severe bout of influenza and his absence showed how indispensable he had become to the protectionists. He remained convinced that protection was a dead duck: 'As long as the great body of the people are fully employed with good wages, any attempt at a popular movement in favor of a protection policy will prove ... a failure,' he wrote to the proprietor of the Bucks Herald.12 He was anxious to dispel the impression that the protectionists were simply reactionary. In the prolonged budget debates he supported the old Radical demand for the repeal of the duty on paper. When this resulted in a bad division, because the Radicals were afraid of defeating the government, he was pleased that it 'destroyed the Radicals monopoly of liberal propo[sitio]ns'.13 Yet, to please his friends the Londonderrys, whose great wealth

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came from coal mines, Disraeli worked against a bill proposing inspection of coal mines, contrary to the line he had always taken on such labour questions. In the end he had to tell Lord Londonderry: 'I cd. do nothing with the infernal bill. My own friends, who are philanthropists, cd. not with consistency, after the ten hours affair, oppose it; & to my surprise, the political economists were also in its favor.'14 The two major events of the parliamentary year were the Don Pacifico debate in June, followed within days by Peel's death. In the debate Palmerston showed through his famous Civis Romanus sum speech that he had acquired a powerful hold on opinion in and out of parliament. Before the debate Stanley advised his lieutenant to hit hard: 'Anything short of guerre a I'outrance would have the effect of reviving, in suspicious minds, old misconceptions.'15 It was a widely held view that Disraeli always pulled his punches against Palmerston and designs for a political alliance were suspected. A junction with moderate Whigs like Palmerston would have posed much less of a threat to Disraeli's personal position than a reunion with the Peelites. Disraeli had once called Palmerston 'the Lord Fanny of Diplomacy' in the Runnymede letters, but he had come to admire much about him and his policies. He was a frequent visitor to Lady Palmerston's salons. Nevertheless he attacked him in the debate from the opposition front bench, as was his duty, for gratuitous interference in the affairs of other nations, meddling and muddling, and for trying to impose upon them British ideas of liberalism and constitutional government. He accused him of sympathizing with 'this modern, new-fangled, sentimental principle of nationality' and argued that in Italy, or in SchleswigHolstein, Palmerston's support for nationalism had been contrary to British interests. But it was Gladstone, not Disraeli, who was judged to have made the more hard-hitting speech. Peelites and protectionists came together with Cobden and Bright in the lobby against Palmerston, who won by 46 votes, with nearly all the Radicals supporting him. Within four days Peel was dead, after falling from his horse, and Disraeli liked to think that there had no longer been ill-will between them. In his 1860 reminiscences he reports Gladstone as saying: 'Peel died at peace with all mankind; even with Disraeli. The last thing he did was to cheer Disraeli. It was not a very loud cheer, but it was a cheer; it was distinct. I sate next to him.'16 It is in fact unlikely that Peel ever regarded him with anything other than distaste.

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While Disraeli was working hard to remove protection as obstacle to the rehabilitation of his party, it was ecclesiastical warfare that was to provide, in February 1851, the first opportunity for the protectionists, now increasingly regarded simply as the Conservatives, to regain office. The apostasy of leading Puseyites like Newman to Rome had caused deep disquiet and a feeling that there was a fifth column at work in the Church of England. These tensions created further obstacles in the way of a Conservative reunion, for so many leading Peelites were High Churchmen. There were rumours that Gladstone himself was secretly a Catholic. Disraeli registered all this with detachment and with an eye only for the political consequences. He was a communicant member of the Church of England, but he had no emotional commitment to any of the parties in the Church. He had defied the bigots in his party over the 'Jew bill' and usually voted for it on the many occasions when it came up again, but he regarded it as a nuisance: 'The sooner we get rid of the Jew Bill, wh:, for my part, I wish were at the bottom of the Red Sea', he had written to the Duke of Newcastle in February 1849.17 In October 1850 the pope, Pius IX, divided England into twelve Catholic sees and welcomed the restoration of the people of England to the Holy Church. There was immediately a furious Protestant backlash against this so-called 'papal aggression'. Russell was ill-advised enough to write a letter to the Bishop of Durham attacking not only the pope but the Puseyites. It looked as if Russell was determined to jump on to the bandwagon of outraged Protestantism, but with his Durham letter he offended both his Irish and Peelite allies. Disraeli was determined not to allow Russell a monopoly of exploiting Protestant sentiment, but he had to keep a tight grip on those in his own ranks who were only too eager to join the prime minister in his fight against the pope. At the beginning of the 1851 parliamentary session Russell brought in an Ecclesiastical Titles Bill forbidding the assumption of British territorial titles by Roman Catholics, a futile gesture which sat ill with his commitment to religious toleration. Although this bill passed with a large majority, Russell was soon afterwards defeated on a motion to equalize the county and borough franchises and resigned. As the Russell government was tottering, Disraeli pulled out all the stops to assert his leadership. He moved another motion on agricultural distress with a three hours' speech, in which he unexpectedly admitted the general

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prosperity of the country, but declared that social equity and political justice demanded that the grievances of that important section not sharing in this prosperity should be addressed. At this time 'Young Morose', the 24-year-old Edward Stanley, later 15th Earl of Derby, a much less ebullient character than his father, was becoming a close friend of Disraeli. The friendship was regarded with mixed feelings by the elder Stanley. Young Stanley wrote in his diary about Disraeli's performance that it was 'a speech which by the confession of all parties has seldom been exceeded in point of ingenuity and tact'. A rather more sceptical journalist wrote: 'No decanter of water, or paper-bags of oranges, or any of your parochial piquancies to sustain the stamina of the desert-born. ... at the termination of this surprising exhibition of physical force ... the glittering Judean ... unconcernedly strolled out into the members' lobby ... called for a small glass of brandy.'18 At the end of this debate the government's majority dropped to fourteen, a result which contributed to Russell's decision to resign a few days later. Mary Anne was rumoured to have her husband's court suit aired and brushed, 'ready for being instantaneously jumped into should he be "sent for" '. The opportunity for the protectionists to form a government had arrived, but the outcome of the crisis was profoundly depressing for Disraeli. Stanley, on his first summons by the queen, recommended the formation of a Whig-Peelite coalition. Russell was unable to form such a coalition, unsurprisingly given the disagreements over the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. The senior Peelites, Lord Aberdeen and Sir James Graham, refused even to try. The ball was back in the court of Stanley and he could hardly refuse a second time without making himself ridiculous. No major Peelite figure was prepared to join him, the overt reason always being the intention of Stanley to restore some degree of protection for corn and possibly sugar. Gladstone was offered any office he cared to take, bar the Foreign Office. The leadership in the Commons, which Disraeli was prepared to surrender to him, was never offered. Gladstone was relieved that the intention to restore a duty on corn saved him from any temptation to join. Stanley therefore had to try forming a purely protectionist government, but it quickly became obvious that there was simply not the necessary talent available. Disraeli later wrote an amusing account of these proceedings, how some turned pale at the offer of office, how Beresford, the whip, claimed that there were suitable men at the Carlton waiting to be called and Stanley

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exclaiming: 'Pshaw! These are not names I can put before the Queen.' The royal couple regarded the possibility of a return to protection with dismay. The queen was still very hostile to Disraeli personally, demanding that Stanley should hold himself responsible for his good conduct. Stanley defended his colleague valiantly and upheld his interests through the twists and turns of the crisis, but he was clearly determined to keep him out of the Foreign Office. The diplomatic corps, through its doyen, the Russian ambassador Count de Brunnow, made it known that they were reluctant to see Disraeli as foreign secretary.19 Stanley made no advances to Palmerston, something that Disraeli had had in mind for a long time. When it was all over Disraeli was very depressed. He wrote to his sister: My opinion is, that we have missed our chance, & that this tide may not easily be again seized. Graham will soon be Minister - at the head of a re-organised liberal party & with a new Reform Bill .... Unless we can precipitate his advent, & force a dissolution on the present franchise, I think it is all up with old England, American principles will then have gained the day. .. .20 He told young Stanley that he would leave public life and return to literature, an idea he flirted with every now and then during years of frustration. He felt it would take time to ' "reunite the fragments" after such a crash'.21 Protection was still not really off the agenda for most Tories and the only advance was that Stanley admitted publicly that if the next election went against protection that would be the end of it. In the summer Disraeli seems to have made an offer to turn the leadership over to Thomas Baring, one of the few men of ability on the protectionist benches, whose ambitions were, however, centred on the family bank rather than politics. The offer may well have been connected with renewed fears of exposure over his debts, perhaps even with the hope of help from the ample Baring coffers. He was turning to writing again, for he was at work on his biography of Lord George Bentinck. Even this may have had financial strings attached, for it was something the Bentinck family, who had lent him so much money, were very keen on. The Duke of Portland shipped two trunks full of documents over to Hughenden. Disraeli finished the biography in December 1851 and it was immediately published. It was a work of selfjustification, for although he never mentions himself by name, it

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is the record of how Bentinck, with the aid of Disraeli, toppled Peel and established the protectionist party. The portrait of Bentinck is so much of a eulogy that it does not come to life. Significantly, Stanley is never mentioned. For much of the time when Disraeli was writing he may have felt that Stanley's negativism was tending to destroy what he and Bentinck had built up. The most remarkable part of the book is the chapter on the Jews. Ostensibly inserted because Bentinck had resigned the leadership over the 'Jew bill', it has no connection with the rest of the book. It repeats much of what Disraeli had already said in Tancred. The opening paragraph sets the tone: The relations that subsist between the Bedoueen race that under the name of Jews is found in every country of Europe, and the Teutonic, Sclavonian, and Celtic races ... will form herafter one of the most remarkable chapters in a philosophical history of man. The Saxon, the Sclave, and the Celt have adopted most of the laws and many of the customs of these Arabian tribes, all their literature and all their religion.22 Again he absolves the Jews from responsibility for the crucifixion and argues that but for them there would be no Atonement. All is race and purity of race. 'What would be the consequence on the great Anglo-Saxon republic, for example, were its citizens to secede from their sound principle of reserve, and mingle with their negro and coloured populations?' The great European revolutions of 1789 and afterwards amount to a rejection of Semitic principles. 'Destruction of the Semitic principle, extirpation of the Jewish religion, whether in the mosaic or Christian form, the natural equality of men and the abrogation of property, are proclaimed by the secret societies who form provisional governments, and men of Jewish race are found at the very head of every one of them.' But the Jews are revolutionaries only because they are persecuted, for by nature they are conservative. 'Thus it will be seen that the persecution of the Jewish race has deprived European society of an important conservative element and added to the destructive party an influential ally.' Disraeli thus reconstructs his Jewish identity to fit his new role as a national leader of Conservatism. But his book could also serve as a text for later racists, Jewish world conspiracy theorists and genocidal anti-Semites. It is perhaps also an act of defiance, a cri de coeur, from one who has been pressed into servitude as a

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standard bearer of the country gentlemen of England, most of whom are too bone-headed to understand him, but who still retains his pride. It must have been while at work on Lord George Bentinck that Disraeli had the remarkable conversation forecasting modern Zionism that the young Stanley reports in. his diary for January 1851. Stanley was visiting Hughenden and they went for a walk in Lord Carrington's park near High Wycombe. Suddenly Disraeli talked 'with great earnestness' about restoring the Jews to their own land: money would be forthcoming: the Rothschilds and leading Hebrew capitalists would all help: the Turkish empire was falling into ruin: the Turkish Govt would do anything for money: all that was necessary was to establish colonies, with rights over the soil, and security from ill treatment. The question of nationality might wait until these had taken hold.23 He repeated his view that the 'Sephardim' were the superior Jewish race and that Mozart, Soult and many other important names were of Jewish descent. If he retired from politics in time he would write the life of Christ from a national point of view. Stanley had never seen Disraeli in such a high state of emotion, but did not ever hear him return to the subject. Disraeli's strange views were not made to please anybody. Even his friends the Rothschilds did not like his condescending attitude to Judaism as an underdeveloped form of Christianity. Whatever he may have said from time to time about returning to literature, Disraeli could not give up the great game and it would not let him go. He would have remained a major player even on the back benches and if he had retired from parliament his creditors would have pounced on him. Frequently his tone is pessimistic: 'the existing institutions of England ... dying out, and the progress of democracy ... . certain', 'The Whigs having become again elate, & talking of a majority of fifty'. It looks like a bad omen when he and the elder Stanley, at Syon House, 'got into deep conference, walking together: and in their abstraction missing the path, wandered into a swamp by the riverside ... they came home in a state neither clean nor comfortable'. But he is still the hero, who only fails because he is inadequately supported. When he manages to reduce the government's majority to thirteen on the budget 'I did it entirely on my own responsibility.

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Some of our friends, I might say many, faint-hearted after all that had occurred, were prophetic of overwhelming defeat, & believed the braggadocio of the Governmt, that they wd have a majority of 80!'24 Whatever the weakness and disarray of the opposition, the Russell government was in no better state and defeat or dissolution might come at any moment. The second opportunity for the protectionists to take office occurred at the beginning of the parliamentary session of 1852. In December 1851 Palmerston had been dismissed because he had approved the coup d'etat by which Louis Napoleon made himself dictator of France. It was the culmination of differences between Palmerston on the one hand and Russell and the court on the other. They arose largely from the gestures which Palmerston, in the case of the Hungarian revolutionary Kossuth and other affairs, had made towards the revolutionary-liberal side in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions. They had made him popular with middle-class Radicalism in the country and his loss further destabilized the Russell government. In the meantime the formal recognition of Disraeli as Tory leader in the Commons had gone a step further. With the resignation of Granby the committee of three, long an empty formality, finally expired. Disraeli, still sensitive about his position, had soundings taken among leading members, which, except for Henley, one of the Tory oldstagers, proved favourable to his formal recognition. The customary reception of leading party members at the beginning of the session, which had hitherto been held at Derby House, was given for the Tories in the lower chamber by Disraeli at Grosvenor Gate. On 20 February 1852 Palmerston had his 'tit-for-tat with John Russell' by defeating the government on a militia bill. Palmerston's amendment to set up a national, instead of a local militia, as proposed by the government, was supported by the Conservatives. Russell resigned and this time Derby, as he now was, had to form a government if he was to retain any credibility. Derby now made the approach to Palmerston which he had failed to make a year earlier and offered him the lead in the Commons and any office except the Foreign Office, from which the royal couple were determined to bar him. Disraeli fully backed this move. To cede the leadership to Palmerston, already in his sixty-eighth year, was a price well worth paying for the greater security of tenure a Derby government including Palmerston would have. The offer failed, because Derby's

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determination not to give up the principle of protection until a general election had decided the question gave Palmerston an excuse for biding his time. Further attempts were made later to bring him on board, but the survival chances of the Derby-Dizzy government were never sufficiently good to tempt him. Nevertheless this first Derby-Dizzy government lasted a little longer than the four weeks that many opponents, Russell among them, were prepared to give it. They called it the Derby militia called out for twenty-eight days and then sent home. The Peelites were willing to give Derby a chance and let it be known that they would allow current business to be completed before a dissolution and general election would clear the air. They were sufficiently Conservative in outlook to prefer Derby-Dizzy for the moment to a configuration that might have lurched too far towards Radicalism. Disraeli became Chancellor of the Exchequer, the only office he ever held until he became prime minister and First Lord of the Treasury in 1868. It was not then as prestigious an office as a secretaryship of state, but it went well with the leadership, for it was less burdensome than the Home Office, for which he had sometimes been considered. He was still persona non grata for the Foreign Office, which went to Lord Malmesbury, with young Stanley as his under secretary in the Commons. Disraeli soon found Malmesbury inadequate and there was little love lost between the two. Disraeli's appointment to the Exchequer was not well received in the press, in spite of the many effective interventions he had made on finance and taxation. Given what was known about his rickety private finances in his youth, it looked too much like the poacher turned gamekeeper. If the extent of his current indebtedness had been known, it would have looked even worse. Even so Derby's famous throwaway remark 'they give you the figures' was hardly called for. Having, by grace of the Peelites, secured a breathing space, the Derby government faced its first major hurdle with the elections in July. The party still had no clear policy on protection. In his declaration on taking office Derby had reiterated his belief in protection in principle, but undertook to defer action until after a general election. Privately Disraeli called this 'protection in its most odious form'. When in April Disraeli introduced an interim, broadly standstill budget he made it clear that the free-trade policy of the previous government had had a favourable impact on the revenue. Derby protested and it was remarked that 'it was

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the eulogy of Peel by Disraeli'.25 In his election address Disraeli advocated, as he had done before, compensation for disadvantaged sectors like agriculture, the West Indian sugar planters and the shipping industry. Not surprisingly, the party spoke with no clear voice in the election and was accused of saying one thing in towns and another in the country. Militant Protestantism was seen as a substitute for a clear financial policy and both Derby and Disraeli gave it some encouragement. Any hope of improving the Conservative party's position in Ireland, raised by Russell's anti-Catholic stance, was thereby dashed. The Whigs did even worse in Ireland and the beneficiaries were the new Irish tenant right party, who came to be known at Westminster as the 'Brigaders'. Peelites were repelled by the bigotry of much Conservative rhetoric. Young Stanley wrote in his diary that Disraeli 'ascribes the loss of several seats to our taking up with the "Protestant cry". I don't differ from this view: but who allowed that cry to be raised?'26 Numerically the Peelites did badly, being reduced to 30 from 40 seats, but the Derby government was still left in a precarious position. The balance of power was held by the Peelites and even more by the Irish Brigade. Parliament had to reassemble in November, for it was a condition of Peelite support that there should be an early clarification of the government's financial policy. As it was, the Peelites had taken their seats on the opposition benches, an indication of where most of them thought their future lay. A great burden rested on Disraeli's budget and he had worked hard on it during the recess. He was almost prevented from presenting it by a free trade motion, which, had it been carried, would have entailed the government's immediate resignation. Palmerston came to the rescue with a more moderately worded motion which was supported by the Peelites and acceptable to most of the protectionists. The Peelites wanted to see the colour of the government's money, the budget, while Palmerston was still playing a waiting game, prepared to come off the fence only when it seemed to his personal advantage. In the debate on this motion the personal hostility to Disraeli came to the surface, when Sidney Herbert, a leading Peelite, referring to Disraeli's tortuous course on protection, remarked about the difficulty the Jews had in making converts, because of the 'surgical operation' involved in circumcision.27 Disraeli's demolition of Peel, the dead leader, had not been forgiven. He had become a lightning conductor in a

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political atmosphere exceptionally charged with ill-will, but he bore such attacks with a mask of indifference. On 3 December 1852 Disraeli presented his budget in a fivehour speech. The most important of the compensations he offered to the landed interest were the halving of the malt tax and the assessment of farming profits to cut their tax liability by half. He could not dispense with the income tax, but proposed to make a distinction between 'precarious', namely earned, and 'permanent', unearned income. The former would pay at only three-quarters of the rate of the latter's seven pence in the pound. This went against Peelite orthodoxy, but appealed to Radical opinion and later became an accepted feature of the taxation system. To make up for the loss of revenue caused by these concessions he proposed to double the house tax and lower the income tax exemption limit from £150 to £100 for earned and £50 for unearned income. It was an ingenious scheme to please as broad a section of opinion as possible. It was Disraeli's bad luck that he had to make some last-minute adjustments owing to the rising level of defence expenditure. As a result his reduction of the tea duty, a move to please consumers, could be only 4½ instead of 6½ pence. He had also failed to take full account of the complexities inherent in the distinctions between the various income tax schedules. Nevertheless the budget did not deserve the hostile reception it got in the Commons from the many self-appointed guardians of Pittite and Peelite financial rectitude. Disraeli tried desperately to stave off defeat. He had a remarkable late night meeting with Bright at Grosvenor Gate, trying in vain to win his neutrality. It was the kind of manoeuvre which, when repeated in later years, fed the distrust that surrounded him. As Disraeli made his winding up speech on 17 December a midwinter thunderstorm raged outside. He finished with the famous peroration about a coalition facing the government, but 'England does not love Coalitions'. Then, contrary to custom, Gladstone rose, 'choked with passion ... his usually calm features ... livid and distorted'. He castigated the Chancellor for the tone of his speech, 'he has not yet learned the limits of discretion, of moderation, and forbearance'.28 He criticised him for taking away with one hand what he had given with the other by raising the house tax and lowering the income tax exemption limits. Much of his criticism was of the technical details of differentiation of income tax and he called the surplus the Chancellor claimed to have achieved fictitious.

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A surplus was again an orthodoxy of Peelite finance. For Gladstone, Disraeli was not only a financial quack, he had become the demon figure that confirmed his own moral rectitude. Always regarded as the leading Peelite most likely to return to the Conservatives he was about to go into coalition with the Whigs. It was a decisive turn in Victorian politics and that Disraeli should have been so much the cause of it illustrates the central position he had now attained.

6 A long haul 1853-1859

Disraeli was loath to surrender office and power. He refused to give up, even against payment, the official robes of the Chancellor, dating from the time of Pitt, to his successor Gladstone, who had a customary right to them. In reply to Gladstone's insistent demands he hinted that his successor was not 'a man of the world'. That he clung to such a minor symbol of office was symptomatic of how all-absorbing the great game of power and politics had now become for him. Others were at least as avid for office, in spite of the pretence to the contrary that was expected of all public men. Palmerston and Russell, to mention only the most prominent, clung to office with no less energy than Disraeli, but with a great deal more success. Ministerial salaries were very high by modern standards, equivalent to what captains of industry and finance, but not politicians, would now command. Both Russell and Palmerston needed their official salaries. Derby himself, who was very rich and whose lack of appetite for office irked Disraeli so much, clung to his position as Tory leader year after year. Sometimes he suspected his lieutenant of plotting to replace him and in the 1860s, when his own eldest son was seen by many as a desirable replacement, Derby was not willing to leave the scene prematurely. In Disraeli's case it was power more than money that was the aphrodisiac, but even if power so often eluded him, he had achieved fame. He was so exotic a figure among the leading men of the day that neither the public nor the makers of public opinion could take their eyes off him. Inevitably he now had to act up to the part his public was expecting of him. He could not allow the mask of 'Asian mystery' to slip, what Malmesbury called 'his mysterious manner, which has so much of the foreigner about it'. For the younger Stanley his cynical and sarcastic manner became at times a tedious affectation.1

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Personal notoriety would not solve the problem how to make the Conservative party into a secure base for government. There was a gulf between the Tory rank and file, mostly county members belonging to the squirearchy, and the official men who would hold office if and when the party achieved a majority. The rank and file were almost impossible to control, because so many of them owed their seats to their personal standing in their locality and not to any party cry or leader. There were two obvious means that might help Disraeli to tighten his grip on his elusive and recalcitrant followers, party organization and the press. In the year or two following the fall of the first Derby government Disraeli did manage to get the party organization more under his control. Beresford, the whip with whom Disraeli's relations had never been satisfactory, was involved in accusations of corruption in the 1852 elections, escaped by the skin of his teeth, but was replaced as whip. He was one of the many members of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy who figured in the second rank of the Tory party and were the source of much militant anti-Catholicism. Forbes MacKenzie, the next whip, also fell victim to accusations of corruption and by 1854 his place was taken by Sir William Jolliffe, later Lord Hylton, with whom Disraeli enjoyed a good collaborative relationship over many years. Much of the extra-parliamentary work of party organization was carried on by Philip Rose, Disraeli's personal lawyer and confidant, and his firm of solicitors, Baxter, Rose, Norton & Co. Rose received no payment for his party work, but another member of the firm, Markham Spofforth, was employed under Rose at a salary in the sometimes murky business of managing elections. In this way, by an intervening layer of those whom Disraeli had memorably labelled Tadpoles and Tapers', a careful distance was maintained between the politicians and any questionable proceedings that might arise in the course of electoral management. A team was in place that Disraeli could trust, but what it could achieve in the electoral circumstances of the day was limited. Disraeli, so much a believer in the power of the spoken and written word, was naturally much concerned over the hostility of the press, which he believed had contributed to the fall of the Derby government. It signalled the bias against Toryism of informed and educated opinion, of what nowadays might be called the chattering classes. In a circular addresssed to Conservatives, asking for their support in setting up a new

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journal, Disraeli admitted: 'It seems that the whole ability of the country is arrayed against us, and the rising generation is half ashamed of a cause which would seem to have neither wit nor reason to sustain and adorn it.'2 The press was certainly overwhelmingly liberal. The Morning Post, at one time a Tory journal, had become the mouthpiece of Palmerston. Daily or weekly papers now mattered more than the periodicals, and those that were still Tory, like the Morning Herald or the Standard, had a reputation for bigotry and were not fully loyal to the Derby-Dizzy leadership. With the help of young Stanley and others Disraeli set up a new weekly paper, The Press, which continued, in spite of financial difficulties, to be published until 1866. Disraeli wrote a great deal for it and, in spite of all efforts to keep his contributions secret, his active participation was widely suspected. After 1855 he wrote less himself, but it was still regarded as his mouthpiece. He sold his interest in 1858. For the first issue he wrote an attack on the Aberdeen Coalition, which articulates the gist of his objection to the principle of coalition: The Coalition is carried on not even by a compromise, but by a mere suspension of principle. There is no similar instance on record. The Administration, therefore, is not morally, but literally a Government without principles. They administer affairs, but they represent no opinion.3 One journal could hardly be expected to turn the political situation round and Disraeli probably lost more than he gained by contributing to it. He certainly lost money, for with characteristic financial carelessness he chipped in from his own resources when he could ill afford it. His journalism became yet another element in the distrust that surrounded him and his colleague Malmesbury once referred to it as his 'cursed' Press. When in February 1853, in his first major attack on the Coalition's foreign policy, he said 'I am myself a "gentleman of the Press" and bear no other escutcheon', there was loud laughter. The only way in which the Conservatives could escape being unfashionable was to espouse policies that chimed in with the prevailing ideas of the contemporary world. In finding a solution to his party's policy and strategy dilemmas Disraeli was sorely handicapped by the fact that he was not in untrammelled command. Derby was unequivocally 'the Chief. As the years passed it became increasingly unlikely that he would, as Graham put it in 1857, toss Disraeli away 'like a sucked orange'.4 It was

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even less likely that Derby's occasional suspicions that his lieutenant might want to displace him were realistic. In 1852 Derby himself told Prince Albert that 'Mr Disraeli knew that he [Derby] possessed the confidence of three hundred of his supporters whilst Mr Disraeli, if he separated himself from him, would very likely not carry five with him'.5 Derby was five years Disraeli's senior and often prostrated by the gout. Retirement was therefore a possibility, but if it happened it would be voluntary. So Disraeli was politically as dependent on Derby as he was financially on his wife. As often happens with marriage partners, they got irritated with each other on occasion, but there was never a serious breach. It was perhaps just as well that there was no cohabitation: Disraeli visited Knowsley for the first time only in 1853 and disliked the house; Derby never deigned to grace Hughenden with his presence. Like a Victorian husband, Derby sometimes administered rebukes, but they were embedded in diplomatic flattery, while Disraeli, for all his show of deference, did not often give ground. Derby had different, but from his vantage point in the upper house just as plausible, ideas of how the Conservative cause might be managed. He deprecated too much pressure on the fissiparous amalgam that opposed the Tories, whether in the days of the Aberdeen Coalition or later of Palmerston. Such pressure would merely consolidate the Coalition and prevent disruptive factors from operating. He sometimes ridiculed Disraeli's restlessness and mercurial moodswings. In Stanley's words, 'He sneered at his tendency to extremes of alternate excitement and depression.'6 But Derby's caution came in for criticism as much as Disraeli's thrashing around. The party needed both, but only success, which rarely came, could vindicate either. Gladstone said in 1851 that Disraeli was both Lord Derby's necessity and his curse, but it also worked the other way round. Disraeli may have been one of the causes for Derby's failure to form combinations that might have given the Tories a longer lease on power in the middle decades of the century, but he was also useful in repelling undesirable boarders. Ideologically they had much in common. Derby, a former Whig, was closer to Disraeli's Conservatism tinged with liberalism and pragmatism than he was to narrow-minded diehards on the Tory back benches. In the circumstances it was, contrary to appearances and tensions, a working partnership, Derby drawing on almost unlimited funds of trust whatever he did, Disraeli applauded as cheerleader, but little loved and expending the

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slight confidence he commanded even as each successive sarcasm scored a hit upon the enemy. The Conservatives might secure the tantalizing object of secure power by policies or alliances or a combination of the two. After the defeat of December 1852 protection was well and truly dead, but some of the old high Tories, men like Newdegate, were still not prepared to give up. Protestantism continued to be very much alive and it was an essential part of the trust inspired by Derby that everybody believed his anti-Catholicism was rock-solid. Disraeli was quite prepared to beat the Protestant drum, but throughout the 1850s and 1860s it became part of his strategy to court Irish Catholics and the Irish Brigade at Westminster. Catholics were natural Conservatives and liberalism in Europe the natural enemy of the pope, he believed. 'Ireland is agricultural, aristocratic, and religious; therefore Ireland ought to be Tory,' he said to Stanley in 1861.7 All this was difficult to square with other facts of life, that much of Irish Toryism was Orange, that 'an Irish Tory is a very different person from an English Tory. He is a real Tory - an enemy to everything popular.'8 Rabid Protestant and anti-Catholic Irish Tories were among Disraeli's fiercest opponents in the party. Yet he was feeling his way towards something like Conservative Progressivism, on issues such as parliamentary reform or on India. Even a bluff, robust Irish Tory landowner and ascendancy figure, Colonel Taylor, whip from 1854 and chief whip from 1859, thought the party had to escape from negativism and go beyond Derby's wait-andsee. Policy was closely tied up with personalities and party alliances. Disraeli, in the past the hammer of the Whigs, was now convinced that the old Whigs must coalesce with the Tories and that those like Russell, who never would, faced a future in the embrace of the Manchester School. The real choice before the nation was between Cobden and Bright on one side, and DerbyDizzy Conservatism on the other, and the Whigs could only choose the latter. But in the daily shifting kaleidoscope of midcentury politics Disraeli had sometimes to regard Cobden and Bright as potential allies in the lobbies, even though he had often labelled them 'democratic' and therefore synonymous with revolutionary. Yet he also convinced himself that middle-class Radicalism was now far from revolutionary and might be an ally in fending off the democracy of universal suffrage. His instinctive prejudice against the commercial middle classes was fading, but

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it remained one of his weaknesses that he had no affinity with that increasingly powerful section of society. However, the Tory squires whom Disraeli had to marshal night after night did not like finding themselves in the same lobby as Cobden and Bright. It was all too easy to blame their devious and unprincipled leader, the Jew, for forcing them into such company. Palmerston remained the most alluring potential catch for the Tories. The failure to catch him in 1855, and again in 1858/59, even after his first premiership, prolonged Derby's and Dizzy's years in the wilderness almost beyond endurance. Palmerston was far too wily a bird to allow himself to be caught and was well aware of his value, even if advancing years were reducing it. His strength was that he could reach out to public opinion better than Derby or Disraeli. Sometimes public opinion was more important than parliamentary strength. In 1857 Palmerston was defeated in the House, but the election he called showed him to be in command of the country. The other man obviously available for courtship was Gladstone, regarded as the Peelite most open to Tory overtures. He would have been an acquisition of more doubtful value, for the Tory rank and file heartily disliked him as a Puseyite, possibly a crypto-Catholic and an overbearing zealot. Derby and Disraeli were warned every now and again by the whips that Gladstone's adhesion would cause a spate of defections. But Gladstone remained until 1859 the 'unreclaimed Eurydice', courted by Derby and Dizzy with restrained enthusiasm. If Gladstone had joined the Tories he would have been a more serious rival for Disraeli than the ageing Palmerston. Disraeli could not, in honour, cede to Gladstone the chancellorship of the Exchequer, for in the financial field they were rivals. It is unclear what would have happened about the leadership, which was never formally offered to Gladstone. It was widely believed that, whatever the formal position, Gladstone would soon have established himself as the de facto leader. The task of any Tory leader in the Commons would have been difficult and thankless in the 1850s and, as it turned out, till the mid-1860s. Disraeli had to face this arid stretch with an extra deficit of trust. The dubious odour of his younger years and the memory of his many 'scrapes' was receding. The image of the alien, and the Jew, were becoming stereotypes. Years in the limelight, countless cartoons, were breeding familiarity with such outlandish features. The verve and cheek with which he had penetrated into the inner sanctum of the establishment gave him

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a certain popularity. When Derby, as Chancellor of Oxford University, recommended his lieutenant for an honorary degree, Disraeli was nervous about the reception he would get in the ancient university, but in fact the undergraduates cheered him to the echo. But the endless manoeuvring and angling for partners was keeping distrust and distaste running high. It became the received wisdom, as his disenchanted and frequently jealous colleague Malmesbury put it, 'to get office he would do anything and act with anyone'.9 A former journalistic ally, Samuel Phillips, also of Jewish origin, published in The Times in January 1854 a vitriolic attack on him. It was a review of an anonymous 600page biography of him, which was itself extremely hostile. The review accused him of having brought the renowned aristocracy of England to his own moral level. 'Benjamin Disraeli will stand before posterity as the great political infidel of his age - as one who believed in nothing but himself. ... Some men believe they are created to sustain a cause; he is firmly of the opinion that all causes are created to sustain him.'10 It was of course only the kind of ammunition Disraeli himself had been in the habit of firing of. The royal couple, in practice Prince Albert, who formed the queen's views on most political matters, remained prejudiced against the Tories and Disraeli in particular. Closer acquaintance during the 1852 period in office had improved relations; Disraeli was impressed by the prince's ability and there was some feeling of mutual respect. Nevertheless the prince was actively involved in the formation of the Aberdeen Coalition, not surprisingly, for the queen's government had to be carried on. During Derby's farewell audience Prince Albert 'spoke often of Disraeli, his talent, his energy, but expressed a fear that he was not in his heart favourable to the existing order of things'. Derby defended his colleague: 'He has better reason than anyone to be attached to our constitutional system since he has experience how easily under it a man may rise.' The prince was glad to hear it, but 'still thought Disraeli had democratic tendencies "and if that is the case, he may become one of the most dangerous men in Europe"'.11 The stereotype of the Jew as a revolutionary subverter of the existing order had lodged in Albert's mind. Disraeli was isolated, but probably no more so than any other exceptional man. Stanley was one of the several young men from the aristocracy who appeared to be his only close friends. Another who attached himself to him at this time was Lord Henry Lennox, an impecunious younger son of the 5th Duke of

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Richmond. He was a lightweight, a gossip, had little administrative competence and nothing like the political significance of Stanley, but his relationship with Disraeli was warmer and more emotional on both sides. Disraeli put himself to trouble and embarrassment for the rest of his life on Lord Henry's behalf, for which he was rewarded sometimes only by petulance and disloyalty. In the privacy of his diary Stanley, in spite of the doubts he has of Disraeli as lacking in principle, has to concede: In two things D's character is more amiable than most persons suppose: the one his willingness, disinterestedly, and often with considerable trouble to himself, to encourage and help on rising men of talents (of which several instances occur to me): the other, which would be well understood by those who knew his domestic position, but which I mention only by allusion, the gratitude which during many years he has never ceased to evince towards a person to whom he owes much of his success, but whose claims upon him in return are neither slight, nor easy to satisfy.12 Marriage and domesticity at Grosvenor Gate and especially Hughenden had indeed become the sheet anchor of Disraeli's existence. In spite of all its frustrations, he found the great political game all-absorbing, but at the end of a parliamentary session he was exhausted. In August 1854 he wrote to Lady Londonderry: 'tho' I left town quite well, I had not been eight and forty hours before I found myself in a complete state of nervous prostration. ... I suppose it is the sudden cessation of excitement, too complete and abrupt for our mortal frames... .'13 He was totally dependent on Mary Anne for his household arrangements. When she was seriously ill in the autumn of 1853, he wrote to Lady Londonderry: 'As she is the soul of my house, managing all my domestic affairs, it is irrespective of all other considerations, a complete revolution in my life. Everything seems to me to be in anarchy.'14 But she was demanding and possessive, and increasingly eccentric in manner, speech and dress. She was now in her sixties and what in younger days was taken as charmingly naive was now embarrassing and even grotesque. There are countless anecdotes about her: when the beauty of a nude Greek statue was being remarked upon, she is supposed to have said 'Oh, you should see my Dizzy in his bath'. Her devotion to him was unquestioning and he would have no ill spoken of her. He had little alternative and had he not been so

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great and famous a man it might have been difficult to tolerate. Even now his financial situation was by no means secure and became difficult again in 1857, when the eccentric 5th Duke of Portland called in the Bentinck mortgage on Hughenden. Disraeli had to borrow again at exorbitant rates of interest. It was not until 1863 that he finally got on to an even keel. A wealthy Tory supporter, Andrew Montagu, bought up all his debts and charged him a low rate of interest. He also came into an inheritance of around £40,000. It came from Mrs Brydges Willyams, a widow living in Torquay. She was like him of Jewish birth, her maiden name being Mendez da Costa. She had written him many admiring letters, which received no reply. In 1851 she asked him to become one of her executors and thereby her residuary legatee. Finally there was a meeting and from 1853 he and Mary Anne visited her regularly at Torquay. His correspondence with her for the ten years until her death in November 1863 is a major source for his biographers and she was buried in the churchyard at Hughenden. The Aberdeen Coalition was fragile and after 1855 Palmerston's hold on power never as secure as it looks in retrospect. This kept hope alive in these barren years. Gladstone's budget in the spring of 1853 gave the Aberdeen government a big boost, but the praise showered on it seems now disproportionate to the obloquy that met Disraeli's efforts in the previous year. Gladstone dispensed with the distinction between earned and unearned income which Disraeli had tried with administratively inadequate provisions to introduce and which aroused the sternest criticism of his successor. It was a distinction that to later ages appeared to be required by social justice. In a speech on the Finance Bill in 1854 Disraeli was still pointing out that 'to make the income tax less unjust, less oppressive and less inquisitorial ... there was one means by which this object could be attained namely, by altering the mode of assessment for the different schedules'.15 Gladstone's budget, with its large surplus and projected income tax reductions, looked good to contemporaries and its author undoubtedly had a better command of financial technicalities than his predecessor. On India the verdict of history went to Disraeli, even though the issue separated him from many in his party. The East India Company's charter was last renewed in 1833 for twenty years and legislation was therefore required. Under the government's bill the dual control between Company and government was left

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intact. Disraeli wanted to end this confusing system and to vest control in a secretary of state, something that came about after the Indian Mutiny five years later, during the second Derby ministry. An amendment moved by Stanley was rejected and supported by only 140 Tories. Stanley describes as the real reason for the failure 'that both Disraeli and I were at this time extremely unpopular, being thought to differ (as we did) from the Conservative masses on most political subjects'. Stanley further confided to his diary that Malmesbury had told him: 'Disraeli could not and ought not to be leader, that place was reserved for me, I might fill it when I pleased, if it were not understood that my sympathies were on the Liberal side.'16 Many Conservatives thought the East India Company was 'a good Tory body not to be quarrelled with' and it irked them that the Disraeli-Stanley proposals brought them close to Cobden and Bright. Disraeli's conduct on this occasion earned him a long letter of remonstrance from Derby père, perhaps more than normally riled by the fact that his son and heir was his lieutenant's principal ally: 'I cannot conceal from you that there is reported to me a growing fear ... that you are gradually withdrawing yourself more and more from the Conservative portion of our supporters, and seeking alliances in quarters with which neither they nor I can recognize any bond of union.'17 Nothing could have shown more clearly who was in command, but Disraeli remained unrepentant. Greville thought that 'it does not look as if the connexion between Dis. and the party could go on long. Their dread and distrust of him and his contempt of them render it difficult if not impossible.'18 There were constant rumours of a new Palmerston-Dizzy alliance leading to a party realignment. In the session of 1854 Russell introduced another parliamentary reform bill and Palmerston did all he could to block it. The Coalition looked like breaking up. Disraeli told Stanley: 'as to the lead, he was willing to give it up, P. being an old man, not capable of sustained exertion: the real power would always remain with himself .. ,'.19 Russell also had another stab at a parliamentary oaths bill, designed, among other things, to permit the admission of Jews. Disraeli felt compelled to vote against it, because of its alleged romanizing implications, which gave Russell a chance to counter-attack, taunting his opponent with insincerity on the Jewish question. This roused Disraeli to unusual passion and it was one of the rare occasions when he abandoned his usual pose of detached irony.

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By this time the drift towards the Crimean War was dominating the public mind. Disraeli played no part in the events that brought about this ‘unnecessary war’, as he and many subsequent historians called it. When the Aberdeen Coalition was formed it was not the Near East or Russia that caused alarm, but the newly revived Napoleonic empire. Friendship with France was one of the more consistent strands in Disraeli’s outlook and he did not share the fear of another Napoleon and widespread aversion to his authoritarian rule. He had known Louis Napoleon during his years of exile in England and felt some affinity with a fellow-adventurer. In the first year of his marriage to Mary Anne Louis Napoleon had rowed them in a boat on the Thames and hit a mudbank. In the reminiscences he recorded in the 1860s Disraeli remembers his wife berating the future emperor: ‘ “You should not undertake things which you cannot accomplish. You are always, sir, too adventurous,” &c. &c. &c. I remained silent.’20The emperor’s opinion of Disraeli was, however, not particularly generous and he said to Malmesbury he ‘has not the head of a statesman, but that he is, like all literary men, as he has found them, from Chateaubriand to Guizot, ignorant of the world, talking well, but nervous when the moment of action arises’.21 In his first major speech after the formation of the Aberdeen Coalition Disraeli attacked the new government for jeopardizing the good relations with France which the previous Conservative government had cultivated. He made much of some incautious words which Sir James Graham had used to his constituents, calling the emperor of the French ‘a despot who had trampled on the rights and liberties of forty millions of men’.22 When war came it further narrowed the scope for effective opposition and for this reason Disraeli was ‘furious’ with the war, as Malmesbury put it.23 Patriotic opposition was the only possible line to take, though there was still plenty of room for attacking the Aberdeen ministry for the diplomatic failures that had led to hostilities in the first place and for the incompetence with which the war was conducted. In January 1855 the Aberdeen Coalition finally bit the dust, as Disraeli had long predicted, but the outcome of the resulting ministerial crisis became the crucial disappointment of Disraeli’s career. It ushered in a decade dominated by Palmerston, except for the brief interlude of fifteen months in 1858/59, when there was another Derby-Dizzy minority government. It took Disraeli a long time

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to get over Derby's failure to form a government on this occasion and his open admission that the Tory party on its own was incapable of fielding one. Even before the crisis Disraeli had complained of Derby's failure to assert leadership. In an often quoted letter to his friend Lady Londonderry he had written, in August 1854: I have received from the highest quarter an intimation that, if things take their due course, the next, I hope, very lasting Tory Government may be under a head which I never contemplated. ... As for our Chief, we never see him. His house is always closed; he subscribes to nothing, though his fortune is very large, and expects, nevertheless, everything to be done. I have never yet been fairly backed in life.24 The 'intimation from the highest quarter' was probably one of Disraeli's flights of fancy. He commanded more respect at court since he had held office in 1852 than earlier, when he was execrated as the man who had brought 'poor Sir Robert Peel' down. He had fully backed the repudiation of the scurrilous accusations of treason against Prince Albert and that, as popular rumour had it, he had been taken to the Tower because of his efforts to avert war with Russia. There may have been doubts about Derby's health, because of his debilitating attacks of gout, but as long as he remained politically active he must have remained the queen's choice should the Tories return to office. As for Disraeli's irritation with his chief, nothing could disguise the fact that his own leadership in the Commons was unable to unite the party. Aberdeen and his colleagues were increasingly unpopular, but a lot of Tories were not keen to replace them with another weak Derby-Dizzy government. Many Tories felt uneasy at the line Disraeli was taking particularly in The Press, that the war should be confined to its original defensive objectives. By and large the feeling among the country gentlemen was 'that everything that could be done for our brave fellow subjects and allies in the Crimea should be done'. Economically the war benefited the agricultural interest and the cause of protection had almost been forgotten. In the immediate run-up to the ministerial crisis the Conservatives were unable to poll anything like their full strength and only 220 Tories voted for the motion of the patriotic Radical John Roebuck, which produced the defeat of the Coalition. Derby had been hesitant about committing himself to an allout attack on the government. It was therefore in character that

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he did not simply accept the queen's commission to form a government, but made his acceptance conditional on securing the co-operation of Palmerston, who in turn made his adhesion to Derby dependent on securing the help of Gladstone and Sidney Herbert. Disraeli was willing to surrender the leadership of the House to Palmerston, but he was not willing to cede the chancellorship of the Exchequer to Gladstone. Therefore the possibility of a Conservative government quickly came to nothing, an outcome which Derby had probably all along anticipated with relative equanimity. He felt the country was clamouring for Palmerston. He may have thought that this overestimation of Palmerston's capacity to deal with the war would soon become apparent and that only then would the hour of the Tories strike. Disraeli and many others, including Gladstone, felt that by bowing out Derby had merely aggravated and perpetuated the inadequacies of their party. Palmerston remained successful for so long because he was in many, even Tory eyes, the best Conservative minister available. Therefore there can be no deepseated ideological reason why the Derby-Dizzy partnership could not have been equally successful. It would have been no offence against the Zeitgeist. The Tories remained the largest cohesive grouping in the Commons and resolute, successful government might have done wonders. Disraeli therefore had ample reason to feel aggrieved and his claim that years of effort on his part had been brought to nought has much justification. Unfortunately for Disraeli, he lacked the political following to enable him to play his own hand and was still only Derby's lieutenant. The next three years were a time of exceptional difficulty for Disraeli. When the three Peelites, Gladstone, Graham and Sidney Herbert, almost immediately resigned from the government they had just joined it seemed a hopeful sign that the old 'impostor' could not last. In May Disraeli launched a major assault on the government over the lack of clarity in their war aims, but was beaten by ninety votes. About twenty Tories voted against their own side, a hard core of anti-Disraeli dissidents. The Times commented: 'Mr Disraeli's object was evidently not to express the feelings of the House, but rather to frame something calculated to damage his political antagonists and, if possible, to bring him and his party into office totally unpledged, and at full liberty to imitate the conduct he condemns.' There was further disarray in the cabinet in July 1855 and Palmerston escaped

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defeat by only three votes over a loan to Turkey. Had the war become really expensive or economically damaging, the government would have been in difficulties and the social situation might have become threatening, but this was hardly a prospect Conservatives could welcome. The problem Disraeli faced as leader of the opposition was that there was a gap between parliamentary opinion and public opinion out of doors. In the country at large middle-class opinion, bolstered by a ground swell from among the voteless masses, wanted outright victory, something that would redeem the national self-esteem. Such feelings were widespread among the Tory grass-roots and reflected by many Tory backbenchers. It was a further complication that the war in the Crimea had put aristocratic government on trial as never before. In a simplistic way the military failures that had brought down Aberdeen were ascribed to aristocratic incompetence and the absence of meritocracy. Victory was desired not only for its own sake, but because it would vindicate the superiority of the middle-class society that Britain was becoming. After the fall of Sebastopol on 8 September it became unlikely that Palmerston could be dislodged, but Disraeli suspected that the prime minister wanted peace terms that could only be secured by continuing the war. His sources of information in Paris told him that the French emperor and public were becoming warweary. At this stage Disraeli's line emerged mostly from The Press, since parliament was not sitting, and it was highly unpopular among the majority of Tories from the Carlton Club down to the constituencies. There was again a clear divergence between Derby and his lieutenant. Disraeli's view was epitomized thus to Jolliffe: 'a party that had shrunk from the conduct of a war, particularly under the circumstances which we did, were bound to prepare the public mind for a statesmanlike peace; that a war Opposition and a war Ministry could not coexist'. Derby riposted thus: I am not prepared to deny that our position as a party is one of extreme difficulty ... but I cannot admit that we shrunk from conducting the war ... but having been, in common with the country at large, parties to entering into it ... we cannot with honour, or even with regard to party interests, constitute ourselves a peace Opposition, merely because we have a war Ministry... ,25

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In his diary Stanley described the situation thus: It does not seem that Lord Derby contemplates, or even desires, a return to office: nor has he any definite policy. He is content to watch events, keeping under his command as large a body of Conservative Peers and MPs as will remain satisfied with inaction. But Disraeli is not among these: and as he and Lord D. are necessary to one another, no separation will ensue: so that the leader in H.C. will have his own way, Lord D. probably dissenting, but not offering opposition. But although thus powerfully reinforced in the Commons, the peace party will fear to put forth its entire strength, dreading a dissolution. ... ,26 Essentially this situation continued throughout the following year. There was little communication between Derby and Dizzy, nor much contact between either of them and their followers. Perhaps Disraeli's isolation and self-obsession helped him to avoid the utter discouragement which might otherwise have overtaken him. He busied himself with a scheme of administrative and departmental reform, as the core of which he proposed a smaller cabinet of only ten. One cannot help feeling that the time spent on these schemes was a kind of substitute for the real power which was constantly eluding him. There were other substitutes. As leader of the opposition the great events of the social calendar and the splendours of royal occasions were open to him and Mary Anne and his taste for such festivities remained undiminished. His letters to Mrs Brydges Williams were a favoured vehicle for reports from the heights of metropolitan society. Tucked away in distant Torquay he might well imagine her deriving vicarious satisfaction from the social, as well as the political eminence of her august correspondent. The other substitute for power was intrigue, something that Disraeli had always loved. Adventurer and Renaissance man that he was, the deviousness and duplicity inseparable from intrigue did not disturb him. Lord Henry Lennox had pandered to that side of him by relaying political and diplomatic gosssip. Now another young man, Ralph Earle, attached himself to Disraeli and came to act for him as private secretary until 1866. Working in the Paris embassy under Lord Cowley, the ambassador, Earle was blatantly disloyal to Cowley and passed on much that should have remained confidential to his patron. Disraeli felt that years of Whig-Liberal ascendancy and

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patronage had populated all branches of the public service with their nominees. It was only fair that Tories should make the most of such opportunities as came their way. In the winter of 1856-7 he and Mary Anne spent some weeks in Paris. He tried to convince Napoleon that a Conservative ministry would serve him better than Palmerston's, but there is no sign that the emperor was persuaded. At home Disraeli had left his party in more than usual disarray. Stanley, his protege, and Pakington, whose inclusion in the cabinet of 1852 he had himself engineered, had virtually detached themselves from the party. Both were in search of that Conservative Progress, with which Disraeli sympathized, but which he was in no position to impose on the party. Palmerston was adept in encouraging all such signs of tension among Tories. Rumours were rife that Disraeli was at last to be discarded, mainly because it looked as if footloose Peelites, Gladstone chief among them, might at last be brought back to the Tory fold. Disraeli's relegation would be the inevitable demand. In fact Gladstone would have been at least as unpopular as Disraeli among Tory backbenchers and in many ways the repugnance would have been more solidly based. Disraeli might be distrusted, but his very political agility gave little ground for principled objection. With his usual optimism in the face of adversity, he prided himself that his pre-session dinner in 1857 showed how united the party was and even Stanley eventually agreed to attend. The reality was that Tories were divided on almost every current issue and the only saving grace was that Palmerston's majorities were also precarious. Disraeli, with the self-deception that often afflicted him, believed that Palmerston could be toppled by the revelation of a secret treaty of 1854, guaranteeing Austria's possessions in Italy. It had come into his hands through Earle and the thought that secret links could thus produce great results had irresistible appeal for him. Derby thought it would prove a damp squib and so it did. Palmerston's defeat came over his support for the high-handed action of Sir John Bowring, governor of Hongkong, against the Chinese at Canton. Disraeli was initially reluctant to attack Palmerston on this issue, sensing that this might be another instance where the prime minister was more in touch with public opinion than the House itself. Palmerston cleverly represented Bowring, a former Radical MP, as an example of middle-class achievement. Nevertheless the government was defeated by 16

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votes: 202 Conservatives had been supported by 63 Liberals, mostly Manchester Radicals, and Peelites, but 24 Tories voted with Palmerston and fifteen stayed away. Parliament was dissolved and the ensuing general election presented the peak of electoral support for Palmerston. Contemporaries were particularly struck by the defeat of many prominent Radicals, what might be called the peace party, Bright, Cobden, Milner Gibson, Layard and Miall, the leading advocate of disestablishment. Lord John Russell lost his seat in the City of London. In fact it was by no means a clear verdict for Palmerston, because parliamentary reform, the grievances of Dissenters over church rates and other issues were prominent in many constituencies. The Tories lost about twenty seats and were reduced from 280 to 260, but Disraeli consoled himself that it was a more cohesive following than it had been and that the losses were nominal rather than real. In his 'never say die' mood he suggested to Derby that on the opening of the new parliamentary session he might pre-empt the other side by moving a resolution on parliamentary reform. The 'Captain' discouraged any such 'bold and decided course' and Disraeli had for the moment no alternative but to play a waiting game. Soon after the election, in June 1857, news of the Indian Mutiny reached Britain. As the news from India became more serious a mood of hysteria and revenge gripped the public, fed by ever more lurid and often exaggerated accounts of atrocities. Disraeli was sceptical about the Indian, as he was nearly twenty years later about the Bulgarian atrocities. From the beginning of the crisis he maintained that this was no mere mutiny caused by 'greased cartridges', but a national revolt brought on by insensitive treatment of all classes in India. He advocated enlisting the imagination of Indians by creating closer ties with the person of the sovereign, a policy which he carried further, again nearly twenty years later. To his credit, and in defiance of the gut reaction of many Tories and the public at large, he 'protested against meeting atrocities with atrocities', a phrase he used at a farmers' dinner at Newport Pagnell in September 1857.27 Palmerston was slow and complacent in dealing with the Indian Mutiny and before long the commercial crisis of 1857, entailing bank failures and bankruptcies, blew his government further off course. Parliament was recalled in December to suspend the Bank Charter Act of 1844 and Disraeli played his usual game of using any and every opportunity to oppose the government. He supported a hostile amendment to the government's bill trans-

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ferring the rule of the East India Company to the Crown, something that he had advocated in 1853 and was shortly to implement. The amendment was defeated by no less than 145, showing again how little grip he had on his followers. But then, just as suddenly, his luck turned. An assassination attempt on Napoleon III on 14 January, the Orsini plot, concocted in London, induced Palmerston to bring in a Conspiracy to Murder Bill. It was designed to make such plotting by exiles in future punishable by life imprisonment. The first reading was not opposed by Disraeli, as ever concerned for the health of Anglo-French relations. As evidence grew of a bout of anti-British feeling in France, the public mood in Britain hardened and Palmerston was accused of 'truckling to France'. He had already shown a cavalier disregard of public feeling by appointing as Lord Privy Seal Lord Clanricarde, a notorious reprobate, but a friend of Lady Palmerston's. Many among his heterogeneous following were disgruntled and the second reading of the Conspiracy to Murder Bill was defeated by 19 votes. Some 80 Liberals, including Russell, as well as Gladstone and Graham, voted against the government, but only 146 Conservatives voted with Disraeli. According to Malmesbury Palmerston 'actually shook his fist at the Manchester clique. Disraeli's face was worth anything - a mixture of triumph and sarcasm that he could not repress.'28 The following day, 20 February 1858, six years almost to the day after the formation of the previous Derby-Dizzy cabinet, Derby was, following Palmerston's resignation, asked to form a government. This time there was no refusing. Up to a point Disraeli's view that 'there is no gambling like polities' was vindicated. The parliamentary position of this second Derby-Dizzy cabinet was, if anything, weaker than the first, for it depended for its survival entirely on a perpetuation of Liberal divisions and infighting. In personnel it was somewhat stronger than in 1852. The most important adhesion was that of Derby's own son and heir Stanley, which could by no means be taken for granted. He went to the Colonial Office and would not have joined without the assurance that this government was set to continue the liberal-conservative course of its predecessor. He confided to his diary that among the disadvantages of joining his father's cabinet was : '1. Connection with Disraeli. Able as he is, this man will never command public confidence.'29 Derby made the usual attempts to secure outside Peelite support by approaching

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Gladstone, Sidney Herbert and the Duke of Newcastle, and also the independent Whig Earl Grey, but to no avail. Grey thought that 'if Disraeli had been out of the way, [his] view of the question would have been altered'.30 Gladstone, fully aware of his dangerous isolation and raring to get back into power, knew that this would have been a very insecure vessel to set sail in. The Conservative government was on a tightrope from day to day and it was widely thought that it would not survive to the recess. In many ways this situation, where tactical agility was everything, suited Disraeli and he seemed to enjoy it. Something of the enjoyment comes across in his vivid reports to the queen describing the day's events in the House. She in turn enjoyed these letters and they made Disraeli's periods in office increasingly palatable to her and the prince consort. If Tory government was to be more than a fleeting episode, Conservative Progress would have to be the watchword. Both Derby and Disraeli made opening statements along these lines. The legislative record of this government was in fact quite respectable and there was some useful minor legislation. As noisome vapours engulfed the Palace of Westminster itself, Disraeli legislated for the waters of the Thames to be cleaned up. A bill abolishing property qualifications for members of parliament went through. Derby remained firmly in command and Disraeli's interest in many issues was primarily tactical, the sheer question of survival, but since survival depended on successful management of the Commons it would make no sense to write down Disraeli's vital role. In what remained of the session of 1858 India took pride of place. Ellenborough, the president of the Board of Control and a former governor-general, taking up the Palmerston government's policy of ending dual control, proposed a secretary of state and a council, half of whom were to be elected under a system that attracted universal ridicule. Disraeli had to respond swiftly by withdrawing the bill, taking the mood of the House by initiating a second bill based on resolutions. All the while he was adroitly enhancing the divisions among the opposition, particularly the rivalry of the two Liberal prima donnas, Palmerston and Russell. The three periods of Tory minority government made him a past master of such tactics and he brought them to perfection in the passage of the reform bill eight years later. Ellenborough nearly brought the government down in May through the publication of a dispatch disapproving of the governor-general Lord Canning's conduct. The situation

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was saved by Ellenborough's resignation, enabling Derby to make another offer of a seat in the cabinet to Gladstone. On this occasion Disraeli wrote Gladstone a letter in a tone very unusual for him: Don't you think the time has come when you might deign to be magnanimous? Mr Canning was superior to Lord Castlereagh in capacity, in eloquence, but he joined Lord C. when Lord C. was Liverpool's lieutenant, when the state of the Tory party rendered it necessary. ... I may be removed from the scene or I may wish to be removed from the scene. Every man performs his office, and there is a Power, greater than ourselves, that disposes of all this. ... ,31 Gladstone was not to be drawn, but he later accepted, somewhat quixotically, the office of High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands at the hands of Derby. Stanley, whose reputation was growing rapidly, took Ellenborough's place and the whole episode ended in triumph for Disraeli. He was cheered in Downing Street, but could not resist ramming it home in a 'slashing' speech, in his sarcastic vein, to his Buckinghamshire constituents at Slough. This gave Palmerston an opportunity to hit back and Sir John Trelawny, the Liberal member for Tiverton, noted in his diary: 'On dit that Derby laughs as much as any one at Palmerston's successful tilt at Disraeli.'32 At any rate the government was safe for the rest of the session and the pundits, men like Greville or Delane, who had earlier hardly given it a week, now veered to the opposite extreme. They gave it as their opinion the Liberals would never come together again and that Palmerston had had his day. Another difficult matter that was settled before the end of the 1858 session was the long-running saga of Jewish disabilities. Disraeli neither could nor would renege on his long-standing commitment to remove this barrier for Jews, which immediately affected his friend Baron Lionel de Rothschild. Derby, although as a former Whig a supporter of religious toleration, was still reluctant to force down the throats of many of his followers something so repugnant to them. But he and his lieutenant now put on an effective double act. Derby continued his show of reluctance, but supported a bill moved by Lord Lucan enabling each House to alter the oath for its members. When this bill was passed in July 1858 Lionel de Rothschild became the first Jew to take his seat in the Commons, a further, though largely symbolic

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milestone in the establishment of religious liberty. The episode badly dented Conservative morale, for even the cabinet members in the Commons remained divided, only Stanley and Pakington fully supporting Disraeli. In the longer run the survival of the Derby-Dizzy government depended on financial policy, foreign affairs and parliamentary reform. On finance, Disraeli brought in a budget in April 1858 which he could do little to shape and which therefore aroused little controversy. It was within the canons of Peelite financial orthodoxy, as his 1852 budget had not been, and secured Gladstone's support. There was no longer any talk of differentiation between earned and unearned income and Gladstone's scheme, proposed in 1853 but interrupted by the Crimean War, of a progressive extinction of the income tax by 1860 was to be adhered to. A large deficit that would have resulted from continuing high defence expenditure, and a repayment of national debt was avoided by the simple device of postponing the debt repayment. The next budget, which Disraeli was planning when the government fell, would have included a reduction of tea duty and the abolition of the duty on paper, impeccably freetrading and liberal measures. On finance Disraeli was always particularly unlucky. Wars and rumours of war deprived him of freedom of manoeuvre and Gladstone reaped where he had sown. There was little Disraeli could do about the increases, particularly in naval expenditure, imposed by the advance of technology: the need to build iron-clads and the adoption of steam. Even more threatening and more immediate was the possibility of another war in Europe. There were abundant signs in the autumn of 1858 that a major European disturbance was imminent and that Napoleon III might be contemplating a war against Austria in the cause of Italian unity. Palmerston had visited the emperor in October and Disraeli divined, correctly, that Napoleon would regard his return to power as a development favourable to French plans in Italy. Malmesbury underestimated, in Disraeli's opinion, the emperor's commitment to the Italian cause. All this amounted to a situation that threatened not only Disraeli's financial plans, but the future of the government. In December 1858 Disraeli sent Earle on a secret mission to the emperor, which accomplished little. Parliamentary reform became, however, the key to the government's survival. Disraeli believed in the aristocratic settlement and could in no way be described as a democrat, but on the

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details of the franchise and the distribution of seats he was agnostic and again entirely governed by tactical considerations. In July 1857 the Whig Edinburgh Review, commenting on Disraeli's Newport Pagnell speech, said: It is by no means certain that a lowering of the franchise beyond what real friends of freedom would deem desirable might not ... increase the political power of the Conservatives; and it is certain that some Conservatives think it might be made to do so. ... Indeed the remarkable speech delivered by Mr Disraeli is a proof that the most astute of the Tory leaders is not unprepared to take advantage of this very combination.33 It was in fact Derby rather than Disraeli who was the driving force in the preparations for the 1859 Reform Bill and Rose, Disraeli's confidant as well as party manager, paid tribute to his knowledge of the subject. He was also astute in playing his cards close to his chest, to prevent disagreements breaking out prematurely in his cabinet. Disraeli, on the other hand, displayed on this matter the insouciance which so often characterized him and maddened others. Palmerston when told by Clarendon that Derby was preparing a bill inferred that it would probably be moderate, 'though, as Dizzy will have a hand in it, it is pretty sure to have some absurd provisions'.34 The provisions which Bright later ridiculed as 'fancy franchises', £60 in a savings bank, an income of £10 from the funds, a government pension of £20 and a university degree, probably owed much to Disraeli. The main provisions of the bill were a uniform £10 franchise in counties as well as boroughs and the transfer of urban freeholders from the county to the borough registers. The latter change would meet a long-standing Tory grievance that such voters were a form of contamination of the otherwise loyal county electorates. The £10 franchise was not low enough to satisfy Liberal, let alone Radical opinion, but it caused the resignation of two ministers, the oldstager Henley and Spencer Walpole. The latter was one of those occupants of the Tory front bench whose lack of stature made Disraeli so indispensable. He was much governed by his wife, a daughter of the assassinated prime minister Perceval, who hated Disraeli as a Jew and for having admitted Jews to parliament. In spite of the resignation of these ministers Tory backbenchers received the bill well and even some of the usual ultras supported it in the crucial division on 1 April 1859. The many disagree-

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ments on the opposite side of the House had led the government to hope up to the last minute that they would win, but they were defeated by 39 votes. It was too obvious that the bill was above all designed to serve the Conservative party interest and for many on the other side it was insufficiently radical. Derby thereupon dissolved parliament. During the election campaign foreign affairs came back to haunt the government. The neutral stance they had adopted in the tensions between France and Sardinia, on the one hand, and Austria, on the other, had received cross-party support and neither Palmerston nor Russell had found much to criticize. But on the very day that parliament was prorogued, 19 April, the Austrians put themselves in the wrong by an inept ultimatum demanding Sardinia's disarmament. This made the Derby government's claims that it had successfully exercised a calming influence on the European situation look very weak. Italy suddenly became an issue in the election and there was a stockexchange panic. Liberals of all hues could persuade themselves that the government's neutrality concealed a pro-Austrian attitude. Nevertheless the election of 1859 marked a high point in Conservative fortunes between 1846 and 1874. According to Jolliffe, the chief whip, they gained 31 seats and their final tally was 306, though this still left them in a minority. Derby pointed out that they missed gaining eleven more seats by the tantalizing margin of less than ten votes. It might have made all the difference and would have put, in Disraeli's words, the government on a 'rock of adamant'.35 His policy of wooing Irish Catholics paid off and the Tories reached their high point of the century in Ireland, with a gain of eight seats. Colonel Taylor, the Tory whip and member for Dublin, had worked hard on the Irish elections. Lord Naas, the Tory Lord Lieutenant in Ireland, had been helpful in the courtship of Irish middle-class Catholics and of the Irish Brigade at Westminster, particularly in the use of patronage. The Italian situation had also helped, for Italian nationalism, and its Liberal sympathizers at home, clearly constituted a threat to the papacy. Tory electoral gains were not enough to ensure the survival of the Conservative government. Immediately after the election Disraeli made a persuasive effort to secure the adhesion of Palmerston. He even held out to him, without any authority for doing so, that he might in due course succeed Derby as leader. The alternative, Disraeli warned him, might be that Russell

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would become prime minister with Radical support. Palmerston returned a straight negative to these suggestions. Another month of manoeuvres on both sides of the political divide followed. Derby and Dizzy considered all sorts of devices to retain their hold on power, including another modified reform bill. The Italian situation was one of several factors that made possible the famous Liberal reunion at Willis's Tea Rooms on 6 June 1859. Of all the Liberal rallies since 1832 this one can most convincingly be portrayed as the foundation of the modern Liberal party. Antipathy to Disraeli personally was a factor in the Liberal rally. As a last desperate throw Disraeli proposed that he and Derby should both retire in favour of Stanley. In the vote on 11 June the Derby government was defeated by only thirteen votes, 323 to 310, and the Tory vote held up remarkably well. Even Gladstone voted with the government. In the end it was the lack of electoral support, however marginal, that defeated the Derby-Dizzy partnership.

7 Frustration and triumph 1859-1868

The next six years in Disraeli's political life were an anticlimax and towards the end, approaching his sixtieth birthday, appeared to point to retirement. Such an anticlimax would still have left him more than a footnote in history. The fairy-tale character of his career would not have been entirely absent, but the echo his name still evokes as a major protagonist in the on-going British political battle would probably be lacking. Fortunately for him he had no immediate reason to feel valedictory on the morrow of his ejection from office. The prospects for Palmerston and for the loosely assorted coalition that had been assembled in Willis' Tea Rooms looked less promising than they had for the similar coalition first put together in 1853. The tensions between the component elements were as obvious as ever and the leader was now approaching his seventy-fifth birthday. Few would have predicted that the prime minister would last another six years and that he would contain the tensions so successfully that he would hand on to his successors a recognizably coherent Liberal party. For the moment even Disraeli had to acknowledge that the opposition could not aim for an immediate overthrow of the government and that another spell as a minority government would make no sense. He therefore fully concurred with Derby's strategy, in the 1860 session, of offering support to Palmerston against the pressure he would face from the Radicals. Most Tory backbenchers did not want to overthrow Palmerston and in time began to see him as the best conservative prime minister they had got. Some of them preferred him to their own leaders and certainly to Disraeli. But in so far as there was an understanding

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between Derby and Disraeli, on the one hand, and Palmerston, on the other, it could only be a limited one and was subject to conditions. If Gladstone were to propose 'a democratic budget making a great transfer of burthens from indirect to direct taxation', the Conservatives would support Palmerston and the rest of his cabinet against Gladstone and his Radical allies. The Tories would not support active intervention against Austria in Italy and the abolition of church rates had to remain an open question on the government side. As Palmerston told the queen, 'this did not, of course, mean an abstinence from usual attacks and criticisms but that no step would in such case be taken to produce a change of Government'.1 Even such a limited understanding made the task of leading the opposition extraordinarily difficult, especially for Disraeli, the originator of the notion that it was the opposition's job to oppose. More than ever he became a lightning conductor for the dissatisfaction which this indeterminate situation was bound to generate. Many of his followers remained suspicious that he would, as on previous occasions, not scruple to seek an alliance with Radicals like Bright, whose disillusion with the Palmerston government was soon palpable, if it would secure his own return to office. These suspicions were articulated in a Quarterly article in April 1860, which declared: 'To crush the Whigs by combining with the Radicals was the first and last maxim of Mr Disraeli's Parliamentary tactics.'2 The author was known to be Lord Robert Cecil, the future 3rd Marquis of Salisbury and prime minister, who became the most formidable of Disraeli's Tory critics until the two men finally made it up in 1874. Lord Robert was one of a hard core of antiDisraelites, which also included old enemies like George Bentinck, likened by Disraeli to a gorilla, because of his size and looks, and Charles Newdegate, who caballed unceasingly for a change of leadership. Stanley thought there was little cordiality between his father and Disraeli, who was occasionally driven to the point of threatening resignation. In June 1860 he wrote a long letter to Sir William Miles, long a leading figure among protectionist Tories, culminating in the declaration that '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 rest of the letter was an account of events since 1846, in which truth, half-truths and amnesia were mixed in typically Disraelian fashion. As was no doubt intended, the letter sent leading figures in the party scurrying around and

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Disraeli was persuaded to withdraw the letter and treat it as not having been written.3 It was frustrating to lead an opposition keen to strike, but reluctant to wound, but Palmerston also lived from hand to mouth. Even Lord Derby, the advocate of 'wait-and-see', was soon speculating how he might form another cabinet. It had to be Disraeli's task to devise strategies that would pull the Liberal coalition apart and the appearance of consistency and dogmatic adherence to principle could not be allowed to stand in the way. Disraeli had to oppose the reform bill which Russell introduced in 1860, even though it was not so very different from the bill he himself had tried to pass the year before. It soon died a natural death, because Palmerston and many Whigs and moderate Liberals did not want it either, but Disraeli had to make the most of the Whig failure of reform and the Radical disappointment at the government's broken pledges. Parliamentary reform as an issue would not lie down so easily, but no further attempts at legislation were made during Palmerston's lifetime. Finance was a more complicated issue and Gladstone was a formidable opponent. The abolition of the paper duties in the 1860 budget and the commercial treaty with France were policies which in different circumstances Disraeli might himself have put forward. He disliked taxes on knowledge and would have proposed a reduction of the paper duties if he had been able to bring a budget in 1859. The French alliance was always a cornerstone of his foreign policy, though he might have preferred an arrangement based more on reciprocity. In 1861 the proposal to repeal the paper duties became tied up with the constitutional rights of the House of Lords to reject financial proposals. In spite of Palmerston's lukewarm support, Gladstone circumvented the Lords' opposition by putting all his proposals into one finance bill. A crucial division, on 30 May 1861, for which at least one member appeared in a wheelchair, gave the government a majority of fifteen, 296 to 281. Both Derby and Disraeli were gravely disappointed. About twenty Tories had stayed away, there were accusations of treachery and Disraeli again talked of resignation. He withdrew from the House for several days but declined an invitation to dinner with members of the Carlton to demonstrate their loyalty. He felt that such a demonstration would merely 'lead to misconception, and foster a notion as unfounded as it might be mischievous, that there is any material want of concord in the Conservative ranks'.4 A year later matters

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had not improved significantly. The Conservatives had decided to support a motion for greater economy moved by the Radical James Stansfeld. It was a point on which the government was very vulnerable, because the division of opinion between the prime minister and his Chancellor, Gladstone, about the level of defence expenditure was well advertised. For once it looked as if Disraeli could execute a pincer movement on the government without incurring the suspicion of angling for an alliance with the Radicals. Palmerston had to announce at the beginning of the debate that he would treat the Conservative amendment as a matter of confidence. At this Spencer Walpole, the mover of the amendment, turned tail and withdrew his amendment. What might have toppled the government turned into a fiasco. It was an occasion on which Disraeli displayed admirable good humour and equanimity, but this could not conceal the divided counsel and sour feelings in the Tory ranks.5 Economy in public expenditure was closely connected with the conduct of foreign policy and the question of war and peace. Foreign affairs loomed exceptionally large in these years of Palmerston's second ministry and injected a passion into the political battle which the domestic scene often lacked. Disraeli regarded foreign policy as his special preserve and chafed at Derby's determination to maintain Malmesbury's reversionary claim to the Foreign Office. In the Commons Disraeli made the most of his role as principal opposition spokesman on foreign policy. The four problems that preoccupied all minds were, first, the Italian Risorgimento, then the American Civil War, in 1863 the Polish rebellion, and in 1864 the Schleswig-Holstein question, Bismarck's first major foray into European politics. Crucial in all these problems were Anglo-French relations and the policies of Napoleon III. Disraeli thought he knew the emperor better than anybody and was always inclined to set his face against the hysteria and fear Louis Napoleon from time to time evoked in Britain. He liked the parallels that were often drawn between his own and the French emperor's career, as the two supremely successful adventurers, and was flattered by what he called 'the great similitude'. For all his preoccupation with race he had little sympathy for Italian nationalism and did not think Italian Liberalism had much substance. The government's support for Italian nationalism helped Disraeli's courtship of Irish Catholics concerned for the survival of the temporal power of the pope, 'an old man on a Semitic throne'. More often than

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not Disraeli was swimming against the tide of public opinion on Italy and, on Napoleon, even against the prevailing opinion among his own followers. The instinctive reaction of Tory backbenchers was to suspect French and Napoleonic designs and to support Palmerston's concern for the national defences against the Radicals and Gladstone. Defence expenditure was sometimes a cause of differences between Derby and Disraeli, because the Tory leader thought it unwise to depart too far from Tory gut reactions on such an issue. Disraeli's phrase 'bloated armaments' had angered many in the party and contributed to the fiasco on Stansfeld's motion. On the American Civil War Disraeli was more in tune with his party, for he shared their instinctive sympathy with the South. He hoped that the discomfiture of the North would prove a worldwide setback for democracy and republicanism. In public he never left the line of cautious neutrality, unlike Gladstone, who in October 1862 appeared to do so by declaring that the leaders of the South had made an army, a navy and 'what is more than either, they have made a nation'. Palmerston and even more Russell laid themselves open to attack on the Polish rebellion and on Schleswig-Holstein for appearing to arouse expectations among Poles and Danes which they could not fulfil. Disraeli seems to have been impressed by Bismarck when he paid a brief visit to London in 1862, shortly before his accession to power in Prussia. Bismarck often spoke with 'appalling frankness', especially on an occasion such as this, when he wanted to impress the leading British politicians. He is said to have boasted to Disraeli that he would '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'.6 Against this, Disraeli wrote to his secretary Ralph Earle that 'Prussia, without nationality, the principle of the day, is clearly the subject for partition'. In 1864 Disraeli belonged to the peace party and was out of tune with majority opinion, not least among Tories. Stanley, who was always for peace and non-intervention, thought Disraeli was telling him one thing and his father another, 'God knows if he has told either of us the truth'.7 The queen's well-known German sympathies would, so Stanley thought, keep Disraeli secure for peace. Whatever he really thought, Disraeli had no difficulty, at the end of the day, in mounting a telling attack on Palmerston, who survived by only eighteen votes in July 1864. If Derby and

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Disraeli had hoped to dent his popularity, they were disappointed. The prime minister's narrow escape in the Commons was not reflected outside. He was cheered by crowds each day he arrived for the debates. Oppositions can rarely set the agenda and Disraeli's defence of the Church during these years may well have been primarily motivated by the need to react against Palmerston's policies. Through his Low-Church ecclesiastical appointments and through his general stance on dissenting grievances, such as church rates and education, Palmerston strove to promote harmony between his Anglican and Nonconformist followers. He was able to keep the movement for disestablishment within the Liberal fold without going very far to meet it. On the other hand Disraeli could plausibly argue, as he frequently did, that the Church was in danger and that its defence was a cause in which all Tories could and should unite. It was easy to be sceptical about Disraeli as a defender of religion, as even his friend Stanley was: I owe him many hints, old habit has drawn us together, and I admire his perseverance not less than his talent but how can I reconcile his open ridicule, in private, of all religions, with his preaching up of a new church - and - state agitation? or how can I help seeing that glory and power, rather than the public good, have been his objects? He has at least the merit, in this last respect, of being no hypocrite.8 Lord Robert Cecil, an enemy, was more sarcastic. In November 1861 he wrote to Carnarvon, another High Churchman, that he had 'long regarded Dizzy's leadership as an irreversible chastisement' and that Disraeli's parade of English churchmanship struck him as a 'senseless affectation of Saxonism'.9 Three years later, when Disraeli's Church defence policy had little to show for it, Stanley reported a plot by the Tory ultras, one of the many that never got off the ground, to replace his father with the strongly Protestant Duke of Marlborough in the Lords, and Disraeli with Lord Robert Cecil in the Commo'ns. As so often, Disraeli's posture can be seen, if not as ridiculous, at least as opportunistic, but it was in line with his long-held and often expressed convictions. Church and monarchy are seen as the essential mainstays of the English polity in the novels of the trilogy. He was now, in the 1860s, merely reiterating these views, for example in a speech at Aylesbury in

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November 1861: 'It is sometimes said that the Church of England is hostile to religious liberty. As well might be said that the monarchy of England is adverse to political freedom. Both are institutions which insure liberty by securing order.'10 Disraeli scored one of his many inconclusive triumphs during these years when, in May 1862, Sir John Trelawny's annual bill for the abolition of church rates was defeated by one vote. He was on friendly terms with the High Anglican Samuel Wilberforce, who as Bishop of Oxford was his diocesan. It was a welcome breach in the coolness that in general subsisted between Disraeli and most High Anglicans. Wilberforce was also a close friend of Gladstone, but he was deeply hurt when his friend failed to secure for him the translation to the Archbishopric of York in 1862 which he coveted. It was to Wilberforce that Disraeli owed the invitation to make a speech at Oxford in November 1864. This speech is always quoted for the passage in which Disraeli took issue with the doctrines of Darwin by saying: 'The question is this - Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels.' The speech was in fact a much wider attempt to debate the questions raised, not only by the apparent conflict between science and revealed religion, but also by contemporary biblical criticism and its liberal, Broad Church followers in the Church: Why, my Lord, man is a being born to believe. And if no Church comes forward with its title-deeds of truth ... he will find altars and idols in his own heart and his own imagination. But observe this. What must be the relations of a powerful Church, without distinctive creeds, with a being of such a nature? ... commencing, as the new school may, by rejecting the principle of inspiration, it will end by every priest becoming a prophet; and beginning as they do by repudiating the practice of miracles, before long, rest assured, we shall be living in a flitting scene of spiritual phantasmagoria.1l Disraeli was no profound theologian, any more than he was a deep philosopher, but he always retained the capacity to absorb the essentials of new intellectual trends and to appreciate imaginatively their significance for the world. There was no doubt something ridiculous about so apparently cynical a figure as Disraeli pontificating on matters of faith and religion and the Oxford wits had a field day. What could be more ridiculous than

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this Christianized Jew appearing as the defender of Church and faith, who regarded 'the Church as the only Jewish institution that remains' and the French Revolution as 'one of the periodical revolts of the Northern races against Semitic truth'? It is easy to see why intellectuals of all hues were so hostile to him. Earnest progressives found him incurably frivolous, while those on the right thought his devotion to 'traditionary influences' a mere pretence. The political advantage Disraeli gained from his Church campaign in the 1860s was slight. Palmerston was not to be toppled and for year after year the prime minister defied the prophets by his political and physical longevity. He turned his old age into something of an asset. When Palmerston at the age of 78 was cited for criminal conversation, Disraeli could still see the joke. He wrote to Derby: 'It should at least make him 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. ... ,'12 There were compensations amid the political doldrums. As long-standing leader of the opposition and former cabinet minister all doors were open to him and few major occasions were complete without his and Mary Anne's presence. Much of this routine, as well as the annual round of country-house visiting, became a bore for him and he needed long periods of recuperation from social as well as parliamentary life in his beloved Hughenden. Even there he had to cope with relays of important visitors. Mary Anne did not like long periods of seclusion, but her behaviour and conversation became increasingly eccentric and dotty. Charlotte de Rothschild thought it was a way of getting herself noticed, when all the attention was showered upon her husband, while she was likely to be ignored. In April 1861 she for the first time accompanied him on a visit to Windsor. Disraeli was pleased with the gracious reception they got from the royal couple, whose distrust of both Tory leaders was clearly a thing of the past. When the prince consort died at the end of that year, politicians of all parties, not least Disraeli, knew that it meant a major shift in the conditions under which they operated. While Albert was alive the monarchy was an active element in the political system, whose influence had been on the increase since the events of 1846 had made the party

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situation more fluid. The prince consort had made the most of these opportunities and Disraeli probably spoke his mind in the remarks reported by Vitzthum, the Saxon ambassador: 'This German Prince has governed England for twenty-one years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our Kings have ever shown. ... If he had outlived some of our "old stagers", he would have given us, while retaining all constitutional guarantees, the blessings of absolute government.'13 With Albert, Disraeli's chances of advancing his personal position were limited, but with the widowed queen he worked overtime to curry favour. He did it mostly by the extravagant praise he showered upon her dead husband and by throwing his weight behind the erection of the Albert Memorial and, less successfully, behind the prince's schemes in South Kensington. The invitation he and Mary Anne received to the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Princess Alexandra of Denmark in 1863 sent him into raptures. He thought he owed it to the queen personally, but it was actually sent on the advice of Palmerston. His description of the wedding and of his personal audience with the queen show that his novelist's pen had not lost its power. Given the low point his political life had reached by this time, it was strange that he did not take it up again. With the improvement in his financial situation brought about by Andrew Montagu's help and Mrs Brydges Willyams' legacy he had less inducement to hack for it and the royalties from his existing works were substantial. Since 1860 he had, however, made jottings, which looked like preparations for his memoirs. Some of them were so frank that immediate publication would have been out of the question. In 1864 his attendances in the House of Commons declined and his apparent loss of interest in politics became a matter for comment. It was noticed that he sometimes slept in his seat on the front bench. If political life was losing some its zest for Disraeli, it is conceivable that a belated midlife crisis may have occurred in his private life. His sister, who as a confidante had always been closer to him than his wife, had died in December 1859. Mary Anne was seventy in 1862 and often in ill-health. Lady Dorothy Nevill, more than twenty years his junior, was a close friend and for many years a neighbour. She was a Walpole, had many links with Disraeli's political friends and colleagues and remained a well-known Tory lady well beyond Disraeli's lifetime. In 1846 George Smythe had caused a scandal by courting her and perhaps making her pregnant. She

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then married, in 1847, Reginald Nevill, nineteen years her senior and a kinsman of the earls of Abergavenny. The current earl, made a marquis in 1876 by Disraeli, was an eminence grise among Tory party managers. Lady Dorothy had several children with Reggie Nevill, but the marriage soon languished. Could her son Ralph, a latecomer born in March 1865, have been sired by Disraeli? Such a possibility was never mentioned, but then family resemblances were never discussed in upper-class Victorian nurseries. A woman called Kate Donovan, born in 1866, who spent her later life in New Zealand, actually claimed to be Disraeli's daughter, but no proof of this exists.14 Until 1911 parliaments could last for seven years, but they rarely went beyond six sessions. The general election of July 1865 came therefore as no surprise, but it was difficult for the Tories to fight. Foreign policy, religion and parliamentary reform would clearly form the themes of the contest and on all of them Palmerston and the Liberals had a clear advantage. Disraeli again sounded the cry of 'the Church in danger', but it did not sound convincing when even a leading Tractarian like E.B. Pusey declared for Palmerston and Gladstone. It was a quiet election, with the number of uncontested seats higher than in 1859. On the other hand the level of split voting was less than half what it had been in 1857. When a voter split his two votes between candidates from different parties, it indicated that personalities and local issues predominated over party feeling. The Tories were left in a position lower than in 1859, higher than in 1857, and with about 290 seats equal to that in 1852. In England there was little change in their position, but there were considerable losses along the Celtic fringe. The losses were most marked in Ireland, where the high point of 1859 was never reached again. Even Disraeli had to recognize that 'if Scotland and the Metropolitan districts are to be entirely, and continuously, arrayed against the Conservative cause ... no Conservative Government, unless the basis be extended, will be possible'. The strength of the party depended too much on the English county vote and on small boroughs, and remained weak in the larger cities. An alliance with moderate Whigs had been an endlessly discussed possibility for years and Disraeli now made one of his many offers to Derby to retire from the leadership in the Commons to facilitate such a coalition. On this occasion his statement that 'I look upon my career in the House of Commons, so far as office is concerned, to have concluded' sounded no more than realistic. Derby instantly

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refuted any suggestion that Disraeli should retire to make a Whig-Tory coalition possible, pointing out, again realistically, that it would make his own position politically untenable and personally intolerable. The dramatic events of the next year would show that even in this age of allegedly fluid party lines the old Whig and Tory loyalties had a great deal of resilience.15 And yet there was hope. Palmerston in his eighty-first year was bound to be near the end of his political life and it still looked that the coherence of the Liberal party depended on him personally. One of the features of the election was a generational change that brought strong personal and ideological reinforcement to the radical wing of the party, making up for its relative numerical weakness. John Stuart Mill had been elected for Westminster and one of his leading disciples, the blind Henry Fawcett, for Brighton, and there was Thomas Hughes, the Christian Socialist and author of Tom Brown's Schooldays. Parliamentary reform may not have caught fire as an issue in the general election, but there were two organizations keeping it alive in the country, the Reform Union committed to household suffrage and the more radical Reform League campaigning for manhood suffrage. Gladstone appeared to have aligned himself with this demand in his famous remark, made in May 1864, that everyone not personally unfitted was morally entitled to come 'within the pale of the constitution'. As the most powerful aspirant to the Liberal leadership after the departure of Palmerston and Russell he had become a highly controversial and divisive figure. Distrust of him among Whigs and moderate Liberals was at this time probably well in excess of the distrust felt for Disraeli on the Tory benches. There was still a gulf between parliamentary opinion, with its narrow electoral base, and the politics of those excluded from the franchise, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer appeared to hitch his future to the latter. Sir John Trelawny observed in his diary: 'There was a curious hiatus on the Ministerial bench, while Gladstone was making a Chartist speech.'16 The death of Palmerston on 18 October 1865, two days before his eighty-first birthday, allowed these tensions to come into the open and restored Disraeli's appetite for politics. Russell, who became prime minister for the second time at the age of 73, and Gladstone, who became leader of the Commons, could hardly sidestep the issue of parliamentary reform nor did they want to, but how far could they go without seriously splitting their

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party?17 Robert Lowe was emerging as the most powerful spokesman for the anti-reform Liberals. He had earlier resigned from the government as the minister responsible for education, because he felt he had been insufficiently supported in a spat with the acerbic Lord Robert Cecil. He was a doctrinaire Utilitarian, who a few years earlier had been attacked by an election mob in his constituency of Kidderminster. He had therefore personal as well as intellectual reasons for distrusting the multitude. He was reported as being unwilling to tolerate a lowering of the borough franchise by 'one sixpence'. The Liberal divisions gave a fresh fillip to rumours of a coalition between Tories and moderate Liberals and a number of names were canvassed as possible heads for such a coalition. On the Tory side Stanley was the most likely candidate, but he was himself conscious of his limitations and virtually ruled himself out. The price of a coalition would probably have been the relegation of Disraeli and Derby, and Derby was if anything even more adamant than his colleague that he would not be relegated, and certainly not in favour of his son. The possibility of giving Tory support to a moderate Liberal reform bill passed through Disraeli's mind, so Stanley recorded in his diary. To leave the issue of parliamentary reform to the Liberals would have been highly dangerous. In addition to the risk of once more marginalizing the Tories, it would leave the details of franchise and redistribution to the other side, who would undoubtedly settle them to their advantage. Soon Disraeli concluded that it was not only in his personal, but also in his party's interest, to offer firm opposition to any Liberal reform bill, whatever its precise shape, but to avoid formal coalition with the Liberal opponents of reform. It was this basic tactical decision that made Disraeli more than ever a central political figure in the complex events of the next two years. His course was entirely dictated by the exigencies of parliamentary tactics and it was only after the event that he justified it as the logical consequence of views he had always held. In the years up to Palmerston's death his leadership of the opposition had been conducted in the spirit of defensive conservatism. His claim was that on the key domestic issues, such as parliamentary reform and the defence of the established Church, it was he who had held Palmerston to a conservative position and had protected him from Radical pressure. This did not accord with the notion of Conservative Progress that he had often preached and practised in the past, against the inclinations

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of his more narrow-minded followers. The reform bill which he and Derby had introduced in 1859 had as one of its main proposals the equalization of the county and borough franchises, thus breaking the principle that the county vote was based on property, while the borough vote was based on occupancy. In fact neither Disraeli nor Derby could decide their course on parliamentary reform on grounds of consistency, for they had already been inconsistent. On 12 March 1866 Gladstone revealed the shape of the Liberal reform bill. Its main provisions were a £7 rental franchise in the boroughs, £14 in the counties. It would have added about 400,000 voters to the electorate and it provided for a lower borough franchise than the Tory bill of 1859. Disraeli had no difficulty in uniting his party in enthusiastic opposition to the bill four days later. The Liberal opponents of the bill, led by Robert Lowe and Lord Elcho, attracted the name Adullamites. Bright, from the opposite end of the party, had likened them to dwellers in the Cave of Adullam, where David took refuge from Saul and where 'everyone that was in distress and everyone that was discontented foregathered'. Bright was not pleased with the bill either, but accepted it as a payment on account. Disraeli left it to Lowe and Gladstone to expose themselves through their extravagant rhetoric. By referring to the venality and drunkenness of the lower class of voters Lowe gave the reform movement in the country some of the impetus it had previously lacked. Gladstone strengthened anti-reform sentiment within the parliamentary Liberal party by appearing to be a more zealous reformer than he really was and by his self-righteous manner. The strength of the Liberal opposition to reform was demonstrated on the second reading, at the end of April. An amendment calling on the government to present their scheme of redistribution before proceeding with the franchise bill was defeated by only five votes. The government had hoped to keep redistribution separate, in order to prevent the resistance it was bound to arouse from interfering with the passage of the franchise proposals. On this occasion Russell did not resign. Instead the government, in order to conciliate the Adullamites, now presented its redistribution scheme, which, as feared, only aroused further opposition. In order to free 49 borough seats for redistribution 63 small borough seats were to be grouped. This alarmed Whigs as well as Tories. There was no provision for the revision of existing borough boundaries, so that the urbanization

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of county constituencies would proceed further. The sense of crisis was further heightened by the economic downturn, signalled by a spectacular banking failure in the City, and even more by the imminence of war between Austria and Prussia. Disraeli's adroit handling of parliamentary tactics added to the government's discomfiture. On 18 June the Russell government was defeated by eleven votes on a wrecking amendment to substitute a rating for a rental qualification. The Radicals in the Liberal party had been shocked by the course of events and would now have wanted a dissolution of parliament. They hoped that an election would show the pressure for reform in the country, but this was precisely what the Whig element in the cabinet, who had gone along with the bill without much enthusiasm, did not want. Ministers decided to resign. Once more the various permutations, a Tory minority government, a Tory-Adullamite coalition under an anti-reform Whig like Clarendon or under Stanley, were canvassed. Many, including Delane and The Times, did not think a third minority Derby government could be taken seriously. Derby himself, aged 67 and for long spells incapacitated by gout, needed to have his courage screwed up and Disraeli performed this task with gusto. It was not too difficult, for the terms set by the Adullamite faction for a coalition were altogether excessive. They thought themselves in the same position as the Peelites were on the formation of the Aberdeen Coalition, but they had neither the cohesion nor the talent. 'You must take the Government; the honor of your house and the necessity of the country alike require it,' Disraeli wrote to Derby.18 Stanley lived up to his nickname 'Young Morose' in doubting the viability of another Tory minority government, as well as his own suitability for the top job, and saw the influence of Disraeli, 'whose invariable rule is, that to refuse office is fatal to a party', in stiffening his father's resolve.19 Events had worked out in the way Disraeli had all along hoped: the Liberal reform bill was destroyed and the unity of the Liberal party with it. No doubt the propects of a Tory minority government were precarious, but they were better than on the two previous occasions when they had taken office since 1846. Disraeli himself would be the key figure in a Tory cabinet and it is at this point that the story of his life and the development of British politics become inseparable. The life of the Conservative government would be precarious, but at last fortuna had smiled and it was for the man of virtu to seize his chance.

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The composition of the cabinet which Derby now formed was much influenced by Disraeli. Among younger men Sir Stafford Northcote, a level-headed, methodical Devonshire baronet, had once been Gladstone's private secretary, but had become a trusted assistant of Disraeli, who insisted on his inclusion in the cabinet as president of the Board of Trade. Another rising talent, Gathorne Hardy, a High Churchman generally supportive, but sometimes critical of the leader, was appointed president of the Poor Law Board, with a seat in the cabinet. The Duke of Buckingham, who had gained Disraeli's respect through the way he had repaired his family's fortunes after his father's bankruptcy, was appointed President of the Council. Malmesbury voluntarily gave up the Foreign Office and became Lord Privy Seal. Thus Stanley could take his place as foreign secretary. Even Lord Robert Cecil, after the death of his elder brother Lord Cranborne, owed his promotion to the India Office largely to Disraeli, a close friend of the Cecil family and frequent visitor to Hatfield. Disraeli liked talented sprigs of the aristocracy even when they were critical of him. He was not always the best judge of talent and he placed excessive confidence in the unscrupulous Earle, using him as a go-between in the delicate negotiations with the Adullamites. Earle now received a junior ministerial post, but soon fell out with his former patron, because he was not further promoted. His place as Disraeli's secretary was taken by Monty Corry, son of Henry Corry, an Irish Tory who entered the cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1867. Monty Corry was the ideal, totally devoted and personally unambitious secretary and factotum that Disraeli badly needed. The big question that faced the third Derby-Dizzy ministry, and on which its survival hinged, was what to do about parliamentary reform. If an Adullamite-Tory coalition had emerged it might have been possible to shelve this issue or at least postpone it to the Greek calends. The Hyde Park riots of July 1866 showed that the unexpected strength of parliamentary resistance to reform had aroused a great deal of resentment among the radical movement in the country. Fear of revolution and of the mob was always just below the surface for most of the nineteenth century. The more timid spirits among politicians and the upper classes were sufficiently alarmed to feel that some widening of the franchise was called for. The queen was among those who felt a settlement was needed. There was enough violence and upheaval in the air at this moment, Fenianism in

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Ireland, war on the Continent, hardship caused by the blip in mid-Victorian prosperity, strikes and the aura of violence and intimidation surrounding early trade unionism, to make many hear the tumbrils roll. Disraeli and his colleagues do not seem to have been unduly alarmed and Stanley, hardly the most intrepid of spirits, noted in his diary two days after the big meeting that broke the park railings: 'some rioting in the parks again, but to a less extent, and done chiefly by boys. ... The effect on the respectable classes rather good than otherwise - as it shows what a mass of ruffianism we are living over: though it is fair to say that there appears to have been no malice in the proceedings, only love of destruction, noise, and fighting.'20 The large reform meetings addressed by Bright in the autumn reminded ministers that the subject could not be simply ignored, but they caused more discomfort to Whigs and moderate Liberals, and even to Gladstone, who had wisely taken himself off to Italy, than they did to the Tory government. Disraeli initially toyed with the idea of disposing of the reform problem by simply taking up the bill where the Liberals had left it, but soon he thought only of delay and postponement. Uppermost in the minds of both leaders was the problem of surviving once parliament reassembled in the new year. No real work was done or conclusions reached on parliamentary reform during the autumn of 1866. Disraeli wrote to Derby in November: 'It may be assumed that the House of Commons is really opposed to any violent reform, and to any Reform of any kind which is immediate.'21 There was plenty to occupy ministers in foreign and imperial affairs. Disraeli was at the centre of all these problems and as Chancellor of the Exchequer was particularly concerned with their financial implications. How to defend Canada, and how much of the burden the home government was to carry, was an on-going preoccupation, now rendered more acute by the end of the American Civil War and the possibility of Fenian incursions. A passage from a letter to Derby of 30 September is often quoted to support the argument that concern for empire was a later addition to Disraeli's politics: 'Power and influence we should exercise in Asia; consequently in Eastern Europe, consequently also in Western Europe; but what is the use of these colonial deadweights which we do not govern?' But this was not his considered view about the settlement colonies, not even about Canada, closest to self-government. In 1862 he said in the Commons: 'I look upon the colonial empire of England as being

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eminently conducive to her strength. The amount of advantage which she derives from it cannot be measured by pounds, shillings and pence, or even by the military force with which at a moment of emergency our colonial connection might furnish us.'22 In his frequent consultations with Stanley on how one should react to the consequences of Bismarck's expansion of Prussia, particularly in regard to Belgium and Luxemburg, one can detect Disraeli's greater assertiveness, which was to drive the two men apart ten years later. 'I think myself, as old Brunnow [Russian ambassador in London] says, "it is time for a little reaction," and that we might dictate a little to Europe. Gladstonism is at a discount,' he told Stanley.23 Disraeli's later attack on the Liberal party of Gladstone as the party of disintegration and cosmopolitanism is clearly foreshadowed. In the meantime he could not as Chancellor push to one side the immediate problems of revenue and taxation. He was vexed by the wasteful and inefficient ways of the Admiralty, then at one of its low points. The following year the Abyssinian expedition, to rescue the British subjects taken captive by the Emperor Theodore, was successful, but again put a strain on the revenue. Disraeli made much of the fact that the expedition was undertaken to right a wrong, and not to acquire territory.24 As the reassembly of parliament drew near, it was still by no means clear how ministers were going to deal with the problem of reform. It was only just before Christmas 1866 that Derby casually tossed into the pot of ideas the suggestion 'of all possible hares to start, I do not know a better than the extension to household suffrage, coupled with plurality of voting'. It would be a subject for a commission to consider, and such a commission, instructed by a series of suitably vague parliamentary resolutions, seemed a promising way of securing delay, while holding out the possibility of an eventual settlement of the reform question for another generation. The actual content of the proposed parliamentary resolutions was hastily considered at a number of cabinet meetings in early February 1867, parliament having reassembled on 5 February. There was wide support for adopting household suffrage in boroughs as the basic principle, provided it was counterbalanced by provisions such as personal payment of rates, a plurality of votes based on rating, the 'fancy franchises' again and a two-year residence requirement. These arrangements would limit the effect of the enfranchisement. Household suffrage had to be dropped from the resolutions, because General

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Peel, the Secretary of State for War, would not accept it and threatened resignation. 'You will find him very placable, except on the phrase "household suffrage", when his eye lights up with insanity,' Disraeli told Derby. When the resolutions were introduced on 11 February, they were badly received and Disraeli, on his own authority, promised a bill. It was central to the whole reform story in 1867, that at key moments Disraeli acted without consulting anybody, mainly because he had to react on the spot to the changing parliamentary mood. It greatly fuelled the suspicions of those who came to believe that he had planned a 'surrender' on reform all along. In the three weeks following 11 February there was a bewildering series of hasty improvisations. Against the doubts of Peel, and more seriously of Cranborne and Carnarvon, a bill based on household suffrage was produced. When it was discussed in cabinet, the three dissentients threatened to resign. In frantic haste, ahead of a party meeting before presentation to the House on 25 February, a substitute based on a £6 rating franchise (equivalent to about £8 rental, while Gladstone's bill of 1866 proposed a £7 rental) was cobbled together, allegedly in ten minutes, hence its becoming known as the Ten Minutes Bill. This was again badly received, most significantly by Conservative backbenchers at a Carlton Club meeting three days later. A key factor in what happened was that most Tories now wanted a settlement offering some permanence and therefore preferred it to be based on household suffrage, suitably watered down. Above all, they wanted the settlement to be made by their own side. The cabinet reverted to its original bill and the three dissenting ministers resigned. It was very fortunate for Disraeli that the ability of these three men, and especially of Cranborne, to organize opposition within the party did not match their bitterness. Much of their venom was focused on Disraeli. Within a week of leaving the cabinet Carnarvon wrote to Richmond, one of the three dukes brought in to fill the gaps created in ministerial ranks by the resignations: 'I do not desire to make mischief or even to give way to the bitterness which I can hardly help feeling when I see the ruin to which he has brought a great Party.' The ruin still had a long way to run.25 The bill that now started on its way provided for rated residential suffrage and would therefore exclude the 'compound' householder, who did not pay his rates directly, but through the rent he paid to his landlord. This would exclude a large number

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of potential voters, but on a very haphazard basis, for there were wide local variations in the practice of compounding. The county franchise was to be reduced from £50 to £15. There was a twoyear residency qualification for new voters. There were 'fancy franchises', a vote for educational qualifications, £50 in government bonds or in the Savings Bank, £1 in direct taxation - this conferring a second vote. It was clear from the beginning that the bill would be subject to much amendment, since the government did not have a majority. Vital to Disraeli's strategy of ensuring the survival of the bill as well as of the government was his skill in outmanoeuvring Gladstone. The Liberal leader endeavoured to show that the enfranchisement the bill proposed was very limited and then put forward his own proposal of a £5 rating franchise. This would confer the vote on the respectable working class, of whose moral soundness he had increasingly convinced himself. It would exclude the feckless poor, for whom the term 'the residuum' had come into fashion. Even Bright wanted to exclude the residuum. Unfortunately for Gladstone, many Radicals preferred a bill enshrining the principle of household suffrage, trusting that most of the limiting clauses could be voted down, since the government had no majority. On the Liberal side, even among those who could not strictly be defined as Radical, many did not want to be seen to be voting against household suffrage and in favour of something that looked more restrictive. Moderate Liberals and Adullamites, a fluctuating group in any case, preferred something offering permanence, rather than an arbitrary limit which would soon be challenged again, a sentiment they had in common with many Tories. A number of other factors frustrated Gladstone. The threat of dissolution frightened a lot of members on all sides, when they had fought an expensive election less than two years earlier. Very few Tories and quite a number of Liberals did not really want to replace Derby and Dizzy with Gladstone. The passionate, zealous and at times overbearing demeanour of the Liberal leader had contributed to the split of 1866 and was still causing unease and distaste. There were always rumours that he was not quite sane and that serious medical opinion held that he would end up in the madhouse. This contrasted with the calm coolness that Disraeli had always cultivated in his parliamentary manner. Gladstone was defeated in April 1867, in two stages: the so-called 'Tea Room Revolt' on 8 April made it clear that his party would not vote for the £5 limit; four days later he lost a

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division by 21 votes. According to Stanley’s analysis 45 Liberals voted with the government, 18 of them Adullamites, and 27 abstained. Only six Conservatives voted against the government, and about 14 or 15 may have stayed away. ‘It is wonderful how the party has held together under all its difficulties,’ commented Stanley.26 It was a great triumph for Disraeli. When early in the morning on 13 April he returned to Grosvenor Gate, Mary Anne was waiting up for him with a Fortnum & Mason pie and a bottle of champagne and he remarked: ‘Why, my dear, you are more like a mistress than a wife.’ It was now likely that the government would manage to pass a bill, but Disraeli still had a delicate hand to play. Another Reform League demonstration in Hyde Park, on 6 May 1867, was weakly handled and led to the resignation of Spencer Walpole, the Home Secretary. Disraeli had to put on a show of firmness in the Commons, for he could not ask his party to swallow simultaneously weakness in the face of popular pressure on the streets and Radical pressure in parliament. The government came close to having either to resign or to dissolve. Having got through this sticky patch, Disraeli was able, on 17 May, without consultation and in a thin House, to accept an amendment by the Liberal Grosvenor Hodgkinson, which simply abolished compounding and thereby enfranchised potentially another half-million electors in large boroughs. He felt he had to justify himself to Gathorne Hardy, who had just succeeded Walpole at the Home Office, and who had been of much assistance to Disraeli in the House. He had acted, he told Hardy, because ‘we might take a step which would destroy the present agitation and extinguish Gladstone & CO’.Hardy had often had doubts about what Disraeli was up to and after the decisive vote of 13 April had written in his diary: ‘It is one thing to break up a Ministry but could I again serve under so unscrupulous a man as Disraeli’. Characteristically he added, many years later: ‘I think I misconceived much in writing thus. This seems too strong.’27Other changes which Disraeli accepted were a lodger franchise based on i10 rating value of the unfurnished lodgings; a lowering of the county franchise to i12, with i5 copyhold and leasehold franchises. One change the government had to accept after they were defeated on it was the reduction of the residence qualification from two years to one. The Tories, however, still reaped considerable advantage from the fact that they retained reform and redistribution in their hands. Only 45 seats were redistributed in England and Wales,

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more than the government intended, but 25 of them went to the counties. Only 15 went to new boroughs and only four to large towns. The boundary commission in 1868 did much to further cleanse the counties of urban intrusions, something the Tories had long striven for, though in the end the settlement was not as favourable to their party as some had hoped. For three-member seats, such as Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, the cumulative vote was introduced, giving each voter only two votes. It was hoped that the third seat would thereby go to the Conservatives. The immediate effect was to stimulate party organization, most famously the Birmingham caucus. Nevertheless the large towns were still seriously under-represented, while many small boroughs, where the Tories were strong, retained their representation. In 1881 there were still 72 members representing boroughs with a population of under 10,000 each and a combined population of less than half a million. At the other end of the scale 75 members represented boroughs of over 100,000 with a combined population of over nine million. In towns, which in 1880 had over 17,500 registered electors, the Tories in 1868 won only 10 seats, while the Liberals won 58. Thus the Liberal ascendancy remained in the places where the bill of 1867 brought about the greatest enfranchisement, but it produced only a limited number of Liberal parliamentary seats. In large towns there were now suburbs where middle-class voters were turning increasingly Conservative. It was 'villa Toryism'. When the next reform bill came along in 1884, Salisbury, the fierce opponent of reform in 1867, capitalized on this urban middle-class Conservatism by rooting for equal electoral districts. This enabled the Tories to turn their support in middle-class suburbia into seats to a much larger extent than the cumulative vote of 1867. Derby might be talking about 'a leap in the dark' and Carlyle about 'shooting Niagara', but there was never any question that this reform bill, like all previous ones, even that of 1832, was intended to adjust the representative system and not create a new one. Disraeli always took that line in public and thought so in private. His view of society was and always had been that it was shaped by a multiplicity of traditions, values, hierarchies and relationships, what he called 'traditionary influences'. He did not take too seriously the welter of statistics purporting to give a spuriously precise number of working-class electors that would get on to the registers at any given level of enfranchisement. At a crucial moment in March 1867 he switched statisticians, from

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Dudley Baxter, a trusted member of the Tory party management team, to Thring, the parliamentary draftsman. He was not above using the statistical fog to reassure, to manipulate and even to obfuscate. He could always justify himself by the argument that if he had given up the bill, the result would have been disaster for the party. He had always abhorred the mechanistic, numbercrunching view of society he attributed to the Utilitarians. Cranborne was similarly logical in a mechanistic manner when he castigated the betrayal that Derby and Disraeli had in his view perpetrated upon their own side. In the article 'The Conservative surrender', in the Quarterly of October 1867, he wrote: A clear majority of votes in a clear majority of constituencies has been made over to those who have no other property but the labour of their hands. The omnipotence of Parliament is theirs, wholly and without reserve. Subject to them is a minority possessed in various degrees of a vast aggregate of accumulated wealth. If he were to set all considerations of conscience aside, each member of the poor but absolute majority would naturally desire so to use this new power as to make some portion of this wealth his own.28 Both Disraeli and Gladstone, and most of their followers, wanted the political and party system to transcend the class struggle, or at least to soften its sharp edges, but neither of the two leaders was so naive as to suppose that class antagonism could simply be removed from politics. Disraeli would have been optimistic about the impact of the bill on the Conservative party even if he had not anticipated that many of the changes, even the abolition of the compounder, would turn out to be less drastic in their effect than was feared. He did not really put his faith in some grand design of undercutting the Liberal bourgeoisie by allying with the Conservative working classes. His contemporaries Napoleon III and Bismarck might be thinking in such terms, but their labouring classes were mainly peasants. Disraeli shared the widely held view that below a Radical, often Nonconformist labour aristocracy, which the Liberals would have enfranchised if he had let them, there was a layer of Conservative working men. He hoped that his party would benefit from the enfranchisement of this lower layer not only through their own votes, but by frightening the middle classes into the Tory fold. He could not resist, however, linking what he had done pragmatically and by

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sleight of hand with his own earlier views of his Young England days and of the Trilogy. Those like Cranborne who accused him of a cynical betrayal had all along suspected him of conspiring to put these views into practice. Now he himself propagated the myth that the events of 1867 were the logical outcome of his deeply held and long-proclaimed convictions. In a speech at the Mansion House, just before the end of the parliamentary session in August 1867, he asked: 'For what is the Tory party unless it represents national feeling? If it do not represent national feeling, Toryism is nothing. It does not depend upon hereditary coteries of exclusive nobles. It does not attempt power by attracting to itself the spurious force which may accidentally arise from advocating cosmopolitan principles or talking cosmopolitan jargon.'29 In October 1867, speaking in Edinburgh, he declared that 'the Tory party was the national party of England', that it 'is formed of all classes from the highest to the most homely', and that he 'had to prepare the mind of the country, and to educate if it be not arrogant to use such a phrase - to educate our party', that he 'had always looked on the interests of the labouring classes as essentially the most conservative interests of the country'.30 For the moment he was only justifying himself and counter-attacking his enemies in the Quarterly or the Edinburgh Review, but he was also laying down the building blocks for popular Conservatism, for what came to be called Tory Democracy. The version of events now propagated by Disraeli was no further from the truth than the Radical myth that popular pressure had forced parliament to reform itself, or the Liberal myth that Gladstone had been the driving force. No ideological volte-face was necessary for Disraeli to prove his consistency in 1867. Disraeli himself had now reached a peak of power and fame. Those who hated him could no longer dismiss him as a charlatan. They had at least to call him, with Carlyle, 'a superlative Hebrew Conjuror'. The Punch cartoon on his Edinburgh speech with the phrase 'educate our party' had the title 'Fagin's Political School'. There was much reluctant admiration: 'A rascal whom I rather like for his pluck & his cleverness', wrote Benjamin Jowett to Florence Nightingale in May 1868.31 A similar sentiment inspired the popular joke 'Why is Gladstone like a telescope? Because Disraeli draws him out and sees through him.' With or without parliamentary reform the popular dimension of politics was on the march. Disraeli was adjusting to it, but he never took to it

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with the zest of his great rival. His world was still that of the gilded salons of an aristocratic ruling class but his own reform bill was a major step in moving the balance of power from the salons to the masses.

U p and down the greasy pole 1868-1 874 The reassuring presence of Derby was essential to the passage of the reform bill, but neither friend nor foe doubted that Disraeli was the prime mover in getting it through. Some thought that Derby, who had never published novels about the natural harmony of interest between upper and working classes, had bent his principles more than his lieutenant. By the autumn of 1867 Derby was more than ever incapacitated by the gout, but the exertions of the session had also prostrated Disraeli. In November both he and Mary Anne were laid up in different bedrooms at Grosvenor Gate and communicating with each other through pencilled notes. She was seriously ill, probably with early signs of the cancer of the womb that killed her within four years. Gladstone, who always got on well with Mary Anne, expressed his sympathy in the House and Disraeli was moved almost to tears. She was often still an embarrassment. Charlotte de Rothschild, Lionel’s wife, was a close friend of both of them, for Mary Anne a confidante, but also an object of jealousy, for she clearly found Benjamin attractive. During the reform crisis Charlotte wrote: ‘Mr Disraeli delightfully agreeable . . . listened to him with intense admiration. . . .It was a great treat to hear him, and even Mrs Disraeli’s presence was unable to mar the pleasure.” Disraeli’s Jewishness struck the world in general as obvious, but for the Rothschilds his idiosyncratic attitude to Judaism was difficult to stomach. When Charlotte had reminded him that they were related through the far-flung cousinage of Montefiores, Mocattas and Lindos, ‘heaven descended is what Mr Disraeli affects to be, though London is full of his relations, whose existence he completely ignores’.z They could not help regarding him as a renegade Jew.

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In February 1868 doctors told Derby that he could not carry on and there was little doubt that only Disraeli could succeed him. There were many in the party who viewed the prospect without enthusiasm. There was talk that some Tory ducal grandee like Marlborough or Richmond might take over and again Stanley was spoken of, but there was no real alternative. Derby's retirement marked a profound change for his lieutenant. Derby had provided him with the perfect foil, the façade behind which he could manage the realities, someone he could respect without being overshadowed. Disraeli's assiduous courting of the queen now paid off, for she could have frustrated his succession if she had been so minded. During these ten months of his first premiership Disraeli further cultivated his relationship with her and exploited it without scruple, but it had public as well as personal advantages. For several years now the queen's wilfulness and erratic behaviour had caused nervousness in political circles. Her refusal to perform public duties, the rumours about her relationship with her Scottish gillie John Brown, the exaggerated view she often took of her prerogatives and her reluctance to fit into the role of constitutional monarch, all this added to the feeling among her aristocratic political advisers that the ground was not firm beneath their feet. The monarchy was not living up to its function as a sheet anchor of social cohesion. Disraeli's first premiership did not last long enough to effect a cure in the monarchical malaise, but he had considerable success during his second tenure. His romantic reverence for the monarchy as an institution made it natural for him to envelop the person of the queen, woman as well as sovereign, in an aura of courtly flattery. He genuinely sympathized with the loneliness of her position, but he had few illusions about what he was doing. Even in 1868 the queen's good opinion of him was a factor in prolonging his tenure of office for ten months. A month after taking over, the great rooms of the Foreign Office were lent by Stanley for a reception by the new prime minister and Mrs Disraeli. It was an occasion even more splendid than those he had frequently described in his novels, but many saw it as a bad omen for England's greatness that such a man should now hold her fate in .his hands. Wilberforce wrote in his diary: 'Dizzy in his glory leading about the Princess of Wales; the Prince of Wales Mrs Dizzy - she looking very ill and haggard. The impenetrable man low. All looks to me as if England's "Mene, Mene" were written on our walls.'3

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To hang on long enough to make his premiership more than a footnote in history was his main preoccupation. By clinging to office Disraeli was going against the fiction that no one was ever eager for office, and there were times when most of his colleagues would have preferred to resign. Without consulting them beforehand he managed to get the queen to hold the dissolution of parliament in suspension until the Scottish and Irish reform bills and the arrangements concerning the redistribution of seats were passed and implemented. When the government was defeated by 65 votes on the first of Gladstone's resolutions for the disestablishment of the Irish Church at the beginning of May, he remained in office. It aroused furious criticism, some of it synthetic, for a dissolution on the old registers would not have been popular. Gladstone, often 'in a white heat', did not dare to move a vote of no confidence, to which Disraeli challenged him. Others besides Gladstone were driven to paroxysms of fury by the spectacle of Disraeli clinging to office with the help of the queen. Bright accused him of talking 'in a manner at once pompous and servile' of his long interviews with the sovereign and, in deceiving her, being 'as guilty as a conspirator who would dethrone her'. It was the end of their friendly relationship that had often aroused so much suspicion on the Tory benches. Cranborne, who had just succeeded as the 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, and whose suspicion of him had reached a degree of paranoia, wrote: 'Matters seem very critical, a woman on the throne, & a Jew adventurer who [has] found out the secret of getting round her.'4 The Fenian attacks in Manchester and Clerkenwell in the autumn of 1867 had once again moved the problems of Ireland to the centre of the British political stage. Disraeli would have been no more inconsistent than Gladstone had he at this moment chosen to devote his main attention to redressing Irish grievances. His famous speech of 1844, in which he had spoken of 'a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world' was widely quoted. His long courtship of Irish Catholics in the late 1850s was not forgotten. But in 1868 his precarious position meant that most possible initiatives were closed to him. Cranborne suspected that 'Dizzy intends to pursue the old game of talking Green in the House, and Orange in the Lobby'. The creation of an Irish Catholic University, already mooted in 1859, was under active discussion, with Manning acting as intermediary between the Irish hierarchy and Disraeli. As soon as

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Gladstone moved on disestablishing the Irish Church in March 1868, Manning and the Irish Catholic bishops transferred their favours to him. Disraeli believed that Manning had played him false and later took his revenge by drawing an unflattering portrait of him, as Cardinal Grandison, in Lothair. To Gladstone's disestablishment and disendowment of the Irish Church Disraeli's response was weak. His cabinet was too divided to decide on any policy. An outright defence of the status quo on the Church of Ireland, which ministered to only an eighth of the population, was virtually impossible and Disraeli fell back on the claim that disestablishment in Ireland was the thin end of the wedge leading to disestablishment of the Church of England. Always keen on conspiracy theories, he said in his first major speech in response to Gladstone's newly proclaimed policy: 'High Church Ritualists and the Irish followers of the Pope have long been in secret combination, and are now in open confederacy. ...' It set the tone for much of what was to follow. Kimberley, the Liberal ex-Lord Lieutenant for Ireland, about to become a fixture in every Liberal cabinet from 1868 to 1895, wrote in his diary: The club gossip today is that Dizzy was half drunk. It seems he drank three strong glasses of brandy & water during his speech, & became quite confused and maudlin after the middle of his oration. He certainly talked arrant nonsense about the conquest of England & Ireland by the Normans, & Dutch!, and Cromwell, and ended by a ridiculous accusation in the Whalley style that Gladstone is leagued with the Jesuits. None expects the Ministry to resign. They will remain &: be dragged together with their party through the mire until the name of Dizzy will stink in the nostrils of the nation, and the Conservative party will cease to exist.5 Thus both main parties came together in relegating to the sidelines socio-economic issues, which might have put the spotlight on class divisions. Education and trade unions were two social issues arousing much attention, which might have played to English voters, particularly the newly enfranchised ones, at least as well as the Irish Church. The Conservative government proposed a bill establishing a Minister of Education, but it did not reach the statute book. More far-reaching measures in the field of education were a hornets' nest, as the Gladstone government soon discovered to its cost. Rate-aided education, the

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introduction of a conscience clause enabling non-Anglican parents to withdraw their children from religious instruction in Anglican schools, these were seen by most Tories as a threat to the denominational system of elementary education. This was the system most of them knew in their own rural areas and which they regarded as an effective way of social control of the labouring classes. The rate burden touched a very raw nerve in the party. The trade union question was made acute by the Sheffield outrages of 1866. The violence apparently associated with strikes and combinations gave enemies of the unions in the press a field day. Rather than deal with these contentious problems the Derby government referred them to a Royal Commission. Disraeli had a general sympathy for social reform, but not if it proved tactically embarrassing to the government's highly vulnerable position. As it was, Disraeli danced to Gladstone's tune by pivoting the Conservative election campaign on the defence of the established Church. Neither he nor his party managers saw the impending electoral contest in other than traditional terms. To counter the network of organizations that gave substance to liberalism in urban areas, ranging from the Liberation Society through the Reform League to trade unions, a movement of Conservative working men's clubs had arisen. A number of younger ambitious Tories were seeking to mould this movement into a nationally influential body through the foundation of the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations in the autumn of 1867. The party managers, headed by the chief whip, Colonel Taylor and Viscount Nevill, now the 5th Earl of Abergavenny, gave these efforts some encouragement. Disraeli was almost dismissive. He addressed some of his speeches to the working men's associations, but did not want a separate working-class movement, perhaps with its own agenda, to grow up within the party. He was more interested in building up a sizeable election fund, by inducing his colleagues and other leading Tories to subscribe generously. Such a fund would be used in the traditional way, to get candidates to contest seats where there was a chance. It seemed the natural response to Gladstone's successful reassertion of Liberal unity around Irish Church disestablishment to defend the Church of England as a Protestant established Church. It was not only Disraeli, but the party managers who believed that the election could be won on a platform of Protestantism, antiCatholicism and a defence of the establishment. Colonel Taylor,

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the chief whip, Monty Corry, Disraeli's secretary, and others in the inner circle of party management belonged to the Irish Anglican ascendancy and saw matters through Orange spectacles. As it happened, an unusual amount of Church patronage came Disraeli's way during his brief premiership, including that of the Archbishopric of Canterbury, and he tried to use it to strengthen the Tory Church defence, no-popery appeal. Perhaps with tongue in cheek he told Derby that Gladstone was making haste to overthrow the government through his Irish Church resolutions because he wanted to get his hands on the Church patronage: 'Strange that a desire to make Bishops should lead a man to destroy Churches!'6 Disraeli's boldest bid for the evangelical, Low-Church vote was the appointment of the Rev. Hugh McNeile, a fiery Irish anti-papist preacher, who had won his spurs in Liverpool, to the Deanery of Ripon. Soon his postbag was bulging with letters of protest from clergymen all over the country. He tried to redress the balance with some of his other appointments, but the most important, Canterbury, went to Tait, a liberal Broad Churchman. Disraeli disliked the Broad Church almost as much as the High Church, but he had no obvious candidate to put forward and therefore succumbed to pressure from the queen. She was personally comfortable with the Low Church and with Scottish preachers, but felt she had to uphold the liberal Church opinions of her late husband. Disraeli was expected to recommend Wilberforce as Tait's successor in London, but was obsessed with the notion that as a High Churchman he was as unpopular as Laud. Not surprisingly Wilberforce, in many ways a worldly prelate, was deeply resentful at being passed over. He turned back to Gladstone. The fact was that Disraeli knew little about personalities in the Church and had no instinctive rapport with any of the Church parties. They were not part of his background or make-up, as they were of everybody else's, and it was one more reason why he appeared a strange 'Asian mystery'. The Church of England as a via media was not in his blood. His approach to Church patronage was entirely political: Rits and Rats [Ritualists and Rationalists] should combine against the common enemy, that was his policy, he told Derby, whose advice he still sought. He found it difficult to distinguish between High Churchmen and Ritualists and suspected all of them as being closet papists. It is unlikely that Disraeli could have won the 1868 election, whatever his tactics. Gratitude has never been a prominent

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feature of politics, and the notion that the new electors would show their gratitude by voting Tory would seem absurd to later psephologists. Disraeli remained optimistic to the last that the Tories would emerge at least as a strong opposition. In fact only 274 Tories were returned and the Liberals had a majority of 110, more consistent, 'mechanical', as Disraeli later called it, than before. Of the 274 Tory seats 217 were in England. The results were dire on the Celtic fringe, with the overall Liberal majority increasing from 47 to 84: there were only seven Conservative seats out of sixty in Scotland; there was the great Welsh revolt against Anglican landlord ascendancy; and, as only to be expected, a further recession in Ireland outside Ulster. There were some consolations: in Lancashire 21 Conservatives won, against 13 Liberals. Here the anti-popery cry had some success. There was even a certain amount of violence against Catholics, mostly Irish immigrants, who were seen as competitors in the labour market. William Murphy, an anti-Catholic agitator from Ulster, whipped up riots, with highly charged attacks on confessionals, nunneries and other features of alleged Catholic depravity. It was not only Orange feeling that worked for the Tories in Lancashire. There was real and long-standing antagonism among the operatives against the cotton owners and against the Manchester School doctrines of the employing classes. On the other hand there were paternalistic Tory employers, like the Hornbys of Blackburn, who could count on their workforce, certainly in the days before the ballot, to support them. In Lancashire the Tory working man seemed to be a reality. Two Liberal defeats were especially sweet for Tories, Gladstone's in South Lancashire and John Stuart Mill's at Westminster. Disraeli had always been somewhat contemptuous of the standard bearer of 'philosophic polities'. Listening to him during his short and not entirely satisfactory innings as a member, Disraeli was heard to remark 'Ah, I see; the finishing governess!'7 Another result that gave Disraeli personal satisfaction was the victory of Lord George Hamilton at Middlesex. He had promoted this candidature by the young guards officer, son of his Irish viceroy, Abercorn, whom he was about to elevate to a dukedom. The Tory victories at Westminster and Middlesex were a vivid illustration of the advance of villa Toryism in London, otherwise still a Liberal stronghold. This time Disraeli did not hesitate to recommend immediate resignation to his colleagues, who all concurred. It was in fact a

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constitutional innovation, for the convention had been up to now to meet the newly elected parliament and resign only if defeated there. Disraeli and his colleagues recognized that it was the voter who now made and unmade governments. The new electorate seemed to have spoken decisively and in Disraeli's immediate resignation there was therefore implicit a recognition that they had conferred a mandate for the disestablishment of the Irish Church. Such a recognition left little room for determined opposition to Gladstone's bill. If Disraeli had met parliament the divisions in his own cabinet, which had made it difficult to find a convincing policy on the Irish Church, would have been forced into the open. It would have seemed an obvious juncture for Disraeli to retire. When he had become prime minister in February he had said, in response to congratulations from W.F. Haydon, journalist son of the painter Benjamin: 'For me it is twenty years too late. Give me your age and your health.'8 Now, at the age of 64, he could only look forward to further long years of opposition with diminished energy. In the next few years his attendance in the House was at times sporadic and often his absence was due to illness. Nevertheless, his request to the queen to confer the customary peerage on his wife rather than on himself was a clear indication that for the moment he would hang on and bide his time in the Commons. Mary Anne became Viscountess Beaconsfield, a departure from convention made possible by the favour he enjoyed at court. Immediately Mary Anne's notes to her husband were written on coroneted paper signed 'your devoted Beaconsfield'. The desire to get even with Gladstone must have ranked high among the motives that decided Disraeli to continue his career in the Commons, just as the same motive did much to determine the Liberal leader to remain in politics after his defeat five years later. The rivalry between the two leaders became a factor in focusing and sharpening the party conflict. For the moment the omens for getting even with Gladstone were poor. The Tories were back to where they had been before 1852 and the dominance of liberalism seemed more than ever confirmed. Yet the Tory party had been kept 'in the game' as a national party, capable of attracting large numbers of voters in all classes, exactly the claim Disraeli had made in his speeches after the passage of the reform bill. He expected a Tory recovery mainly in parliamentary terms. He could see that Gladstone was no Palmerston and would sooner or later alienate so many groups and interests that his position would be shaken.

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After many years Disraeli returned to literature. In 1869 he was working on a new novel and nobody knew about it. As a worldwide celebrity he could expect that whatever he wrote would sell and his financial situation was even now not all that secure. Mary Anne's death, which, as he must have known, could not be far off, would seriously curtail his income. He must also have known that his many opponents in the Tory party would hardly welcome the reminder that they were still being led by a Jewish litterateur. It was one more sign that the attacks of his party critics, which he had endured for twenty years, no longer bothered him too much. Lothair was the kind of novel Disraeli had always written, located in the high aristocratic society that had ever been his preferred subject. This time his style was less extravagant, his descriptions more realistic. There is less striving for effect - it was no longer needed, for it was remarkable enough for an ex-prime minister to stage a comeback as a novelist. When he was writing his early novels he was on the margins of this great aristocratic world, now he had experienced it from the very centre. There is a sense of nostalgia, as if he was aware that this society was changing fast and that soon it would be no longer as he knew it. His pen portraits are often sharp, but his characterization is no stronger than it was in the past. Here is the sprawling metropolis of London: '... endless boulevards, some bustling, some dingy, some tawdry and flaring, some melancholy and mean; rows of garden gods, planted on the walls of yards full of vases and divinities of concrete, huge railway halls, monster hotels, dissenting chapels in the form of Gothic churches ....' 9 He makes Cardinal Grandison, alias Manning, say: 'The world is wearied of statesmen, whom democracy has degraded into politicians, and of orators who have become what they call debaters.'10 Perhaps there is the hint of a self-portrait in Pinto, who had been brought from Portugal by a nobleman a quarter of a century ago and had remained: 'From the favourite of an individual he had become the oracle of a circle, and then the idol of society. He was never at any time either humble or pretentious. Instead of a parasite, everybody flattered him; instead of being a hanger-on of society, society hung on Pinto.'11 Disraeli plays with a lot of the ideas and problems that were topical at the time, the pretensions of the papacy and the Catholic Church, the machinations of secret societies, Fenian and other republican conspiracies. He entertains with telling quips, but on the whole skims the surface.

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Disraeli retained his almost subliminal receptivity for the spirit of the times in its manifold manifestations, but he neither could nor would engage with it very deeply. The conflict between the Church of England, the Church of Rome and Revolution, represented by the three female heroines of the book, is an ambitious theme, but Disraeli does little more than make it into a good read for his contemporaries. His earlier preoccupation with the Jews as a race and Judaism as a religion is less marked, probably because his problems of self-identification had long been resolved, but the pilgrimage of the hero to the Holy Land remains a feature of this novel. Phoebus, the successful painter, represents the Aryan principle against the Semitic, Disraeli's response to the fashionable stress on Saxonism in historical writing and perhaps also to Matthew Arnold's thesis about the Hebrew strain in the English middle-class ethos. Lothair was a success on both sides of the Atlantic and led to the publication of a new collected edition of his works, with a preface that contains a good deal of self-justification: It will be seen that the spirit of these productions ran counter to the views which had long been prevalent in England, and which may be popularly, although not entirely accurately, described as utilitarian. They recognised imagination in the government of nations as a quality not less important than reason. They trusted much to a popular sentiment, which rested on an heroic tradition and was sustained by the high spirit of a free aristocracy. Their economic principles were not unsound, but they looked upon the health and knowledge of the multitude as not the least precious part of the wealth of nations. In asserting the doctrine of race, they were entirely opposed to the equality of man, and similar abstract dogmas. ... In the six years to 1876 Disraeli earned £10,000 from his novels, a large sum, but literature was a supplement, not a substitute for politics. The House of Commons remained the centre of his life, even if for the moment 'the utmost reserve and quietness' had to be the watchword. On the disestablishment of the Irish Church he had to discourage opposition from his own back benches, lest the weak and divided state of the party should be too flagrantly revealed. But he seemed almost to revel in the isolated and exposed position in which he found himself:

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But who's afraid? Certainly not the leader of her Majesty's Opposition. Between ourselves, readers, we think that Disraeli likes his position, and would not have it otherwise. And really, when we come to think of it, there is something very flattering to his pride in this position. ... And we must not forget the pride of race, which ever burns inextinguishable in the breast of this singular man . . . 1 2 Thus William White, the principal doorkeeper of the House, in one of the sketches he wrote, on 27 March 1869, for the Illustrated Times. The main battle was in the House of Lords, where it was not a matter of stopping disestablishment, but securing the best possible terms. The Tory peers were not united and Derby, on what turned out to be his last appearance in the House, insisted on outright opposition on the second reading. Disraeli had to work quietly in the background for compromise. The leadership of the Tory peers gave Disraeli a good deal of trouble. Malmesbury did not wish to carry on after the resignation of the government in December 1868 and there was talk that Salisbury might take over. Since he and Disraeli were not on speaking terms this would have caused great difficulty. Disraeli managed to persuade Cairns, who had been his Lord Chancellor in 1868, to take on the task. Cairns was a self-made lawyer from Ulster, with strong evangelical, Low-Church views, whose advice Disraeli increasingly valued. At the end of the 1869 parliamentary session Cairns, whose health was never good, refused to go on. By this time Stanley had arrived in the upper house as the 15th Earl of Derby and his fellow Tory peers elected him leader. He declined, wishing to preserve a more independent position. Once more there was talk of Salisbury taking over and even Conservative newspapers saw this as a natural outcome, after Derby's refusal. The widespread dissatisfaction with Disraeli in the party would thus have been institutionalized, but even then his removal would have been difficult. Only disgust or ill-health could have forced him out, for no one could have led the party in the Commons as long as he could threaten to retire 'below the gangway'. In the session of 1870 the two big bills promoted by the Gladstone government were on Irish land and elementary education. Disraeli was frequently absent through ill-health and there were rumours that he could not carry on. The education bill was the most significant measure of the whole parliament. If

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he had had the opportunity Disraeli would have wished to deal with the problem himself, not so much from the point of view of improving equality of opportunity, as of maintaining what later came to be called 'national efficiency'. The battle of Sadowa, so it was argued, was won by the Prussian schoolmaster, and the industrial pre-eminence of Britain was threatened by an undereducated population. 'We must educate our masters', so Lowe was slightly misquoted as saying in the reform debates. The bill brought forward by W.E. Forster was more favourable to the Anglican position in primary education than Tories had a right to expect. Denominational education was to be maintained and further aided, and only where provision was inadequate would school boards be established. Even though not everything was to the taste of his party, Disraeli supported the government against its own, increasingly outraged Nonconformist supporters. The split in the Liberal ranks, for which he had long hoped, had at last appeared on a major scale. Too much opposition from the Tories was only likely to close it again. Late in the session a number of changes were introduced by the government, to appease the Nonconformists, and these were mostly opposed by the Conservatives to defend the Church interest. Disraeli's most memorable intervention was on the Cowper-Temple clause, which banned the teaching of catechisms and distinctive formularies in board schools. 'You are inventing and establishing a new sacerdotal class. The schoolmaster who will exercise these functions ... will in future exercise an extraordinary influence ... upon the conduct of Englishmen,' he said.13 The legislative activism of the Liberal government and, as his opponents saw it, the manic restlessness of its head was exacting its toll, as Disraeli had expected. Events abroad, the FrancoPrussian war, the renunciation of the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris by Russia, and the Alabama claims by the United States, were even more dramatic in their impact. The great British public was left feeling uneasy by the apparent inability of the country to influence the earth-shaking events on the Continent, and its seeming submission to Russian and American assertiveness. Disraeli, in spite of his long-standing commitment to close Anglo-French relations and his distrust of Bismarck, had, in common with most opinion, initially seen France and Napoleon as the initiators of the war. When he was replying to the address at the opening of the 1871 session of parliament he had been able to reach a more considered view:

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This war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the revolution of last century. I don't say a greater, or as great a social event. What its social consequences may be are in the future. Not a single principle in the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six months ago, any longer exists. ... The balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the country which suffers most, and feels the effects of this great change most, is England.14 Inevitably Disraeli was also scoring debating points, that an armed neutrality on the part of Britain would have prevented the war, and claiming that it was Britain that in the days of the Conservative government had thus avoided war over Luxembourg. He castigated the reductions in defence expenditure which the Liberal government had enforced and which, he claimed, had weakened the armed forces. He argued that the conference called by the Gladstone government to deal with the abrogation of the Black Sea clauses was merely a fig-leaf to cover Russia's unilateral action, itself a consequence of the profound disturbance of the balance of power that had taken place. On America he was also in a strong position, since he had never openly advocated the recognition of the South. He warned that Americans should not think they could with impunity insult Britain 'with rowdy rhetoric', as they insulted no other country. Events, and Disraeli's response to them, were preparing the ground for the claim that the Tory party was the true guardian of the national interest, a test the Liberal party was failing. Even Gladstone's Irish bills had signally failed to pacify that country, but merely encouraged 'sacrilege and confiscation'. In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war the Paris Commune broke out, an event which revived the fear of revolution that was pervasive among the possessing classes throughout the century. It helped to induce a more conservative mood in the middle-class electorate, but it also made Tory politicians sensitive to social reform issues. Some of Disraeli's colleagues got involved with a strange initiative that surfaced in the autumn of 1871, the New Social Movement, which sponsored a programme of seven points, including slum clearance, local self-government, an eight-hour day, and an extension of 'public service' on the model of the Post Office. Conservative and labour leaders would come together in this movement,

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though the names of the union leaders George Potter and William Applegarth and the Reform League secretary George Howell frightened Tories like Hardy and Carnvarvon from the outset. Derby thought that the labour leaders wanted 'to work on the feelings or party-interests of the landed class, as against the mercantile and manufacturing employers'. He regarded some of the objectives as amounting to a socialist programme and declined to join the Committee. Disraeli gave guarded encouragement, but not in public. He never saw reforms of this kind as a means towards greater class equality or democracy, but more paternalistically, as a way of confirming the interest of the labouring classes in the maintenance of existing society and its stability. His instinctive dislike of the middle and commercial classes was by now well moderated. In fact he was keeping a weather eye on electoral developments. The retirement of Markham Spofforth, who had succeeded Rose as party agent, gave him the chance to carry out a considerable reorganization of party management. He appointed John Eldon Gorst, a 35-year-old lawyer, to succeed Spofforth. Gorst had, as member for Cambridge, been an opponent of reform in 1867, but once the 1867 Reform Bill reached the statute book became an enthusiastic supporter of what came to be called Tory Democracy. He lost his seat in 1868 and accepted the succession to Spofforth because he saw in it an avenue to influence and eventual return to the House and to office. His appointment almost inevitably pushed him into a tense relationship with the whips, who had traditionally overseen electoral management. Gorst concentrated his attention on the greatly enlarged borough electorates, while the whips and grandees like Abergavenny were mainly concerned with the counties and small rural boroughs, which still returned the bulk of Tory members. Through Gorst Disraeli acquired an alternative source of information on what was going on at the grass-roots, especially in places where the Tories had previously had little presence and of which he had no first-hand experience. Gorst was soon busy calling into existence local Conservative associations and clubs and making sure that seats were contested. He set up a Central Conservative Office in Parliament Street, which also became the headquarters of the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations. In due course most Conservative associations and clubs, particularly in boroughs, affiliated to the National Union, of which Gorst was

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an honorary secretary. The Central Office was the professional centre of the party, the National Union the apex of the constituency associations. Pragmatically the prototype of modern party organization had come into being, in some respects ahead of similar developments in the Liberal party, with farreaching implications for the balance of the constitution. Gorst saw his own future bound up with Disraeli and he saw Disraeli as the progressive leader dragging his party, kicking and screaming, into the era of political democracy. In 1871 by-elections began to signal a gradual erosion of Liberal support. Disraeli, chastened by years of opposition and minority government, was not anxious to topple Gladstone prematurely and realized that any decisive move by him would only close the natural fault line in the Liberal party between moderates and radicals. He was often gloomy and under no illusion that he personally could turn the political situation round. In July 1871 he told Derby that Delane had remarked to him 'that there was no reaction of public feeling in favour of any individual, but that there was a strong reaction against one namely the Premier: this D. went on to say, he thought, was about the truth'.15 Lady Dorothy Nevill reports in her Reminiscences that until late in life he was convinced that 'the great mass of the people of England were prejudiced against him'. He could only make the most of the many accidents and mishaps that befall all governments. He could not, for example, oppose the Cardwell army reforms outright, he could only attack as unconstitutional the method, the use of the Royal Warrant, by which the purchase of commissions was abolished. The reforms were fought inch by inch, introducing tactics of obstruction almost for the first time, by the 'colonels'. They were Tory backbenchers, most of whom hated the Jew novelist, who unfortunately happened to be their leader. For most of his career Disraeli was attacked for doing almost anything to obtain power, now his passivity was the cause of much of the dissatisfaction. Often the lack of attack was the result of calculation, but it was also obvious that Disraeli was getting old and no longer had his former energy. Mary Anne's decline was casting a shadow and he spent hours driving with her through the streets of London, something she enjoyed and that restored her. In February 1872 there was a meeting of Tory leaders at Burghley House, Lord Exeter's seat, at which Cairns, one of Disraeli's closest colleagues, started the ball rolling by the suggestion that it might be better

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for the party if Derby was recognized as leader. Noel, the chief whip, declared that Derby's name might be worth forty or fifty seats and this opinion was still repeated a year later by Colonel Taylor, who had then resumed the position of chief whip. The possibility of Derby taking the lead was widely discussed in the newspapers and while it is not certain if Disraeli knew about the Burghley discussions, he must have been aware that a Derby leadership would have been widely welcomed in the party. Derby had cross-bench and cross-class appeal and for many the combination of blue blood and liberal repute was irresistible, but Disraeli knew only too well how hesitant and indecisive he could be. Derby always suffered from doubts and low self-esteem and would have been reluctant to pit himself against Disraeli, though under the stimulus of his wife a hankering after the top job was not entirely absent. It was the old story and the Burghley meeting reached no conclusion. Shortly after Burghley there was an upturn in Disraeli's fortunes. On 27 February 1872 there was a thanksgiving service at St Paul's to mark the recovery of the Prince of Wales from a life-threatening attack of typhoid. Disraeli was loudly cheered by the crowds lining the streets, while Gladstone was received with silence and even hostility. Disraeli's popularity was confirmed when he visited Manchester five weeks later. That such manifestations of mass favour should have been taken so seriously was perhaps due to the fact that other indicators of public standing, such as opinion polls, did not yet exist. The Prince of Wales's illness and recovery also seemed to mark a return to popularity of the monarchy. The previous two years had seen a marked and organized upsurge of republicanism. It was a matter that had caused much alarm among all members of the governing elite in both parties, including Disraeli. He had taken the opportunity of a speech at the harvest festival at Hughenden in September 1871 to enter an eloquent eulogy of the queen. His own rehabilitation was much advanced by his visit to Lancashire at the beginning of April. The speeches he made there and at the Crystal Palace in June have become centrepieces of the Disraeli myth as the founder of modern popular Conservatism. The visit to Lancashire had been mooted for at least two years and Gorst gave its realization high priority in his drive to make urban Conservatism into a significant electoral force. Disraeli himself hesitated long before he accepted the invitation to go to Manchester. It could only be a success if it

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signalled a real revival in his own and the party's fortunes and this was a long way off in 1870. The soundings which Gorst took showed only too clearly the reservations which existed even at the grass-roots about Disraeli. In 1868 Lancashire was the jewel in the crown of working-class Toryism, but a great popular demonstration in the circumstances of the 1870s required the cooperation of all, from the highest to the lowest. In the case of Lancashire this meant the good will of Derby and the Stanley family, of other large aristocratic landowners, of the gentry, of Tory mill owners and other employers and only at the end of the day of the Conservative working men. Derby saw Disraeli on the eve of his visit and found him unusually nervous: 'he said he did not like his visit to Manchester, it had been forced upon him by importunity continued ever since the last general election (this I know to be true) and at last he was obliged to give way'.16 Some of this show of reluctance may have been for the benefit of Derby. Not only was he invading Stanley territory, but some interpreted his going as a counter to any pretensions to the leadership Derby may still have harboured. But there can be no doubt that such forays into mass politics were not really congenial to him. He gave Derby an outline of his speech, but 'admitted that he was anxious about the chance of any ill-considered phrase escaping him in so long a speech: his memory of subjects and facts was good, but he had always found verbal preparation impossible'. It must have been on his mind that both his apparent growing mass popularity, as well as the continued bitterness of many leading Tories towards him, all went back to the role he had played in 1867. He remarked to Derby that the Reform Bill, which he intended to vindicate in his speech, 'had only restored to the working classes the electoral privileges which they had before 1832 in the boroughs where scot-and-lot vote existed: which Ld. Grey's bill took away, and the loss of which he said had caused the chartist movement'. The speech at the Free Trade Hall on 3 April lasted three hours and twenty minutes and how much of it the audience of allegedly 6000 could really hear, let alone take in, is doubtful. There was not much in it that Disraeli had not said before. Derby thought the length was excessive: he missed the 11 pm train and only got to bed at 3 am. 'The first two hours were occupied with a kind of essay on the British constitution, ingenious, but to my mind somewhat unreal: most of his argument would not have been difficult to answer had any body cared to take the republican

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side.'The labouring classes, he again stressed, had as great if not a greater stake than other classes in the stability which the constitution and its principal pillars, monarchy, parliament and Church, had for centuries safeguarded. All had been under attack in the immediate past and remained at the centre of the political battle. It was not stretching matters beyond the customary bounds of party controversy to blame Gladstone for defending them inadequately and therefore undermining them. It was, however, not this traditional defence of the constitution which came to be regarded as the really significant part of this speech, and of the speech which he made on 24 June at the Crystal Palace at a banquet of the National Union of Conservative Associations. It is the passages on social reform and empire that subsequently seemed like a manifesto for the Conservative party of the later nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. Even in these passages Disraeli was not saying anything that he had not often said before. On social reform he was in both speeches quite short and very general. At the Free Trade Hall he used the mildly jocular adaptation of the Vulgate's 'vanity of vanities, all is vanity' into Sanitas sanitatum, omnia sanitas to highlight the mundane prescription that 'the first consideration of a minister should be the health of the people'. It was a joke he had used before. At the Crystal Palace he was slightly more specific, mentioning housing, air, light and water, factory inspection and purity of food. These problems, the condition of the people, the condition of England, were under constant discussion and had been for a long time and Disraeli had concerned himself with them at least since the publication of Sybil, He was careful to enter the proviso that legislative intervention was limited by 'those inexorable rules of political economy to which we must all bow', but he probably believed that there might be less 'bowing' in the future.17 Disraeli devoted rather more time in these speeches to foreign and imperial policy, especially at the Crystal Palace, but again he was doing no more than delivering a more generalized version of the attacks he had already made on the policies of the Gladstone government. Before he made his attacks on the government's policies on the Franco-Prussian War and the abrogation by Russia of the Black Sea clauses in 1871 he had written to Derby: 'I am not ... sorry to see the country frightened about foreign affairs ... because it is well that the mind of the nation should be diverted from that morbid spirit of domestic change and criticism, which has ruled us too much for the last forty years,

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and that the reign of priggism should terminate.'18 What he said at the Crystal Palace was not very different. The second great object of the Tory Party, besides upholding the institutions of the country, was 'to uphold the Empire of England. ... there has been no effort so continuous, so subtle, supported by so much energy ... as the attempts of Liberalism to effect the disintegration of the empire of England'. He regretted that when selfgovernment was conferred on colonies it was not 'conceded as part of a great policy of imperial consolidation. It ought to have been accompanied by an Imperial tariff ... and by a military code which should have precisely defined the means and the responsibilities by which the colonies should be defended, and by which, if necessary, this country should call for aid from the colonies themselves. ... All this was omitted, however, because those that advised that policy ... looked upon the Colonies of England, looked even upon our connection with India, as a burden upon this country, viewing everything in a financial aspect. ... '19 Fortunately the colonies had frustrated this policy of separatism by their sympathy for the Mother Country. Disraeli himself had, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, sometimes viewed relations with the colonies from the financial aspect, but on the whole he could claim that his remarks at the Free Trade Hall and the Crystal Palace were consistent with attitudes he had always taken. He sensed that 'economical government' was no longer the surefire winner that it had been for Gladstone in the past. On foreign and imperial matters he felt himself entitled to draw a clear distinction between the Conservative and the Liberal party, between 'national and cosmopolitan principles'. The country must make a choice and he had no doubt that the working classes would be among those choosing the patriotic option. What made his passages on social reform and empire important was not their immediate impact, but the way they were seen in retrospect as guidelines for the policies of the government he was to form in 1874. It was already elementary political wisdom that parties in opposition should not tie themselves to a specific programme too early. The Tories were taunted by their opponents with the absence of alternative policies, but Disraeli had now done something to fill the vacuum. Most of it was in the realm of rhetoric and image-making, but Disraeli was almost postmodern in his tendency to believe that in politics image was reality. There was good deal of press criticism of his

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Manchester speech, but political circles were again impressed by the enthusiasm for him among the masses. On the whole his colleagues were now satisfied with him. Even Carnarvon told both Derby and Northcote that he now felt that the reform bill did not have the adverse consequences he had feared. Salisbury took a little longer to come round. It was, however, significant that in his regular contribution to the Quarterly in October 1872, 'The position of the parties', he no longer wrote a word of abuse of Disraeli, acknowledged a change in the political climate in the Tories' favour and merely warned against a premature attempt to come to power, a warning that was unnecessary. Mary Anne was game enough to accompany him to Manchester, but within three weeks he confided to Lady Derby 'with much agitation' that she was dying. Derby had married, in 1870, the widow of the 2nd Marquis of Salisbury, and had thus become the stepfather of the 3rd Marquis. Mary Anne's death, on 15 December 1872 at the age of 80, was an enormous blow for him. Isolated, self-contained and incapable of dealing with much of the ordinary day-to-day business of life as he was, he was lost without a woman fussing around him with total devotion. 'Who will now dye his hair for him?', people asked. He had to move out of his London home, Grosvenor Gate, and live in a suite of rooms at Edwards' Hotel in George Street, Hanover Square. In the spring of 1873 he was even temporarily deprived of the services of the faithful Corry, whose father was dying. It was fortunate that both his personal and his party's fortune were clearly in the ascendant, otherwise he might well have given up. There was widespread sympathy with him in his loss. Trelawny noted in his diary at the beginning of the 1873 session: 'Disraeli and Gladstone received loud cheers on entering the House. D. had most and it was noteworthy that both sides warmly expressed their sympathy with him.'20 In his lonely eminence he soon found solace in female friendship. He had known the two Forester sisters, Anne Countess of Chesterfield and Selina Countess of Bradford, since the 1830s and their father was the Shropshire peer whose influence had secured him the nomination at Shrewsbury in 1841. Selina was 54 and the wife of the Earl of Bradford, Anne was seventeen years older and a widow, both were grandmothers. He proposed marriage to Anne, but it was Selina who really engaged his affections. Such relationships, so much of them carried on by letter, are now difficult to fathom and play-acting would be too facile an explanation. Disraeli was

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perhaps not only enamoured of Selina, but in love with the idea that he, an asthmatic and gouty septuagenarian ex-prime minister, was still young enough in heart to play such love games. The historian must be grateful, for the correspondence reopens the window into Disraeli's mind which had been closed since the death of his sister in 1859, and of Mrs Brydges Willyams in 1863. Some 500 letters to Lady Chesterfield have survived and no fewer than 1100 to Lady Bradford, as against only 250 to Mrs Brydges Willyams. Selina sometimes found his ardour embarrassing, but bore up well, Anne was always ready with comfort and solace. Selina's husband was a sporting peer who had little in common with Disraeli, though the two did not dislike each other. It is not clear how much of the correspondence between his wife and the Tory leader Bradford saw. Some of it, from both sides, was of a compromising character and the occasional unease of Selina was not surprising. She for her part was sufficiently attracted by the man, as well as flattered by his eminence and power, to have carried on. The Tory recovery did not always run smoothly nor could it be taken for granted that it would end in electoral victory. Disraeli was afraid that Gladstone would seize an opportunity to dissolve parliament before the Conservative recovery had matured, or force him by resignation to take office prematurely. This was precisely what happened when Gladstone was defeated on his Irish University bill in March 1873. The prime minister had boldly grasped the nettle which Disraeli had failed to grasp in 1868. By this time the alliance between Irish Catholicism and English liberalism forged by the disestablishment of the Irish Church had come apart. Gladstone's complex scheme attracted the hostility of both Irish Catholics and English Radicals. When he resigned Disraeli refused to take office, thereby creating a frequently cited constitutional precedent. Disraeli argued that the defeat of the government had not been brought about by the opposition, but by a chance combination of forces that had otherwise nothing in common. Gladstone resumed office. Disraeli had been advised from many quarters that if the Tories took office, for the fourth time as a minority government, their rising support might well drain away again during the interval before parliament could be dissolved and an election held. The extreme care with which Disraeli had to operate is illustrated by the letter he sent to the Tory candidate at a byelection in Bath in October 1873. The Tories had won both Bath

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seats from the Liberals in the course of this parliament, one of them almost certainly because the National Education League had put a separate candidate in protest against the Liberal government's Elementary Education Act. Disraeli's letter used the language of the hustings: Tor nearly five years the present ministers have harassed every trade, worried every profession, and assailed or menaced every class, institution, and species of property in the country. ... All this they call a policy, and seem quite proud of it; but the country has, I think, made up its mind to close this career of plundering and blundering.' The kind of middle-class opinion that was moving towards the Conservatives was thought to be outraged by such extravagant and extreme language, especially when the Conservatives failed to carry the seat. The Economist, under the editorship of Walter Bagehot, declared that this letter was the most foolish a Conservative leader ever wrote and that the reluctance of his party to have Disraeli as leader would be increased tenfold by this extravagance. W.H. Smith, the 'bookstall man' and soon to be made the ruler of the Queen's Navee by Disraeli, was typical of the dissenting employers, who, come to wealth, had become Tory and Anglican. His comment was: 'Disraeli has ruined himself and rendered reconstruction of parties - new choice of leaders almost inevitable.'21 Derby thought the letter violent, foolish and in bad taste, but knew Disraeli well enough to concede that it was not meant to do more than encourage the party and 'excite their zeal'. By-election upsets often produce extravagant comment, soon forgotten, but the extra measure of disapprobation that Disraeli received from those who considered themselves sober and level-headed is obvious even at this late stage. Could one take this man seriously? Shortly afterwards he visited Glasgow to be installed as Lord Rector of the university. In one of his speeches he referred light-heartedly to the ups and downs of his relationship with his party. After pointing out that his leadership of a great party had lasted longer than anybody else's he said: 'I cannot help smiling sometimes when I hear the constant intimations that are given, by those who know all the secrets of the political world, of the extreme anxiety of the Conservative party to get rid of my services. The fact is, the Conservative party can get rid of my services whenever they give me an intimation that they wish it. Whenever I desired to leave the leadership of the party they have too kindly requested me to remain. ... '22 It was fortunate for him that the rival for the leadership who was

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always most widely canvassed was Derby, who had neither the will nor the capacity to play the role of rival. To the suggestion that the party would gain from his leadership Derby's usual answer was that Disraeli 'was a personal friend and an old colleague, and that I was therefore the last person who could entertain the idea of superseding him'. Whether this was the whole truth is another question. Apart from Bath, the by-election woes of the Gladstone government continued into January 1874. Suddenly on 24 January Gladstone announced the dissolution of parliament. Disraeli had come up to London for a meeting of the trustees of the British Museum, when a servant brought him The Times carrying the news. He had only a limited opportunity to consult his colleagues, who ahead of the parliamentary session were still scattered all over the country, before issuing his address. The centrepiece of Gladstone's appeal was still the same that had first made him into a national figure twenty years earlier, economical government leading to a reduction in taxation and in particular to the abolition of the income tax. Admiralty and War Office pressure for higher expenditure was one of the reasons why Gladstone chose this moment to go to the country. In reply Disraeli took much the same line as he had in his speeches during the previous two years: the Tories were not opposed to either low taxation or necessary reform, but they would not indulge in the legislative excess with which the Liberals had harassed every interest in the country, nor would they continue the weakness that Gladstone had shown in foreign and imperial affairs. Disraeli made the most of the pressure which, he alleged, the extreme section of the Liberal party had exercised upon the government with their attacks on the monarchy, the empire and the Church. There were no positive commitments, for Disraeli could hope that over the years enough rope had been given for the Liberals to hang themselves. He was not optimistic that he could win much more than a stalemate and even Gorst's calculations were of a majority of only three. The majority of nearly fifty was therefore a great triumph, all the sweeter for coming at the end of a thirty years' drought. The perception of contemporary and later commentators, that it was a negative victory, caused by Liberal divisions and disillusionment, cannot seriously devalue it. Voters in the age of mass electorates are motivated by many, often contradictory impulses, which even modern methods of opinion research find

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difficult to disentangle. Disillusion with the performance of the incumbents in power must always form a large element in all such motivations. This was essentially the truth Disraeli had perceived when he risked a large extension of the franchise and which fitted into the view of society he had always put forward. Even in an age of individualism society was a network of obligations, privileges and influences that overrode the cold statistics of class differentials. Compared with 1868, the swing to the Conservatives took place in almost all types of constituencies and affected middle-class as well as working-class voters. In 1874 the Tories won 44 of the 114 seats in boroughs with a population of over 50,000, as against 25 in 1868. In the 118 English boroughs under 20,000 they won 60 seats in 1874, as against 52 in 1868. Even a man like Gorst, who now thought of himself as a Tory Democrat putting into practice the design of his master, always emphasized in his reports that the organization of urban Conservatism involved finding the middle-class leaders who would in turn mobilize the working-class voters. Working men who were politically conscious were likely to be responsive to the many bodies, Nonconformist and otherwise, linked to the Liberal party, while the kind of working man who might vote Tory was not usually highly politicized. Political commentators, most of them Liberals, were now portraying Disraeli as the progenitor of 'democratic Toryism', who through his reform bill had sought to bring into the political system the layers of society below those amenable to the Liberals. His game had now succeeded and there was, to the progressive mind, something profoundly sinister about that. For Disraeli it was a vindication beyond measure. 'The Carlton is crowded till midnight: all the dear "old lot" whom we know so well - all the frondeurs and the cynics - professors, now, of a common faith, cry for "The Chief" as young hounds bay for the huntsman the day after the frost has broken up ... ', thus Corry wrote to him as the results were coming in 23

9 Apotheosis 1874-1878

Disraeli himself said that power had come to him too late, but even if his health had been better and his energy greater his conduct of the premiership might well not have been much different. He was impatient of detail, but his capacity for work and for absorbing information was still formidable. Carnarvon's complaint that he did no work and that Monty Corry was effectively prime minister does not hold water. He realized that a prolonged spell at the top of the greasy pole meant that he could not dissipate himself on detail. It was for him to give general policy orientations and trust those whom he had appointed to carry them out. Disraeli's cabinet appointments show that he was still leading the country party and most of his cabinet of twelve were drawn from the high aristocracy. Those that were not had either been long co-opted, like Cairns and Gathorne Hardy, or came, like Northcote and Ward Hunt, from the Tory squirearchy with long pedigrees. The obvious exception was the Home Secretary, R.A. Cross. Even he was a Lancashire banker educated at Rugby. He was no particular devotee of Disraeli's and owed his promotion to the cabinet to Derby, whom Disraeli consulted closely during the formation of the government. He became a central figure in the government's domestic legislative programme, but Disraeli often got irritated with him. 'This comes of giving high office to a middle-class man,' he wrote to Selina, when Cross had talked of the prime minister's 'state of health'.1 The world of business, industry and commerce remained uncongenial to Disraeli, but he knew well enough that he owed his victory, in large measure, to seismic changes in the middle-class mood and through the years of Tory recovery he had taken care to cultivate it. Nevertheless most of the benches behind him were still filled with the

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representatives of English rural areas and several spokesmen for the agricultural interest, who in the past had sometimes been thorns in his flesh, were given junior appointments. The only representatives of urban Conservatism were W.H. Smith at the Treasury and Viscount Sandon, heir to the Earl of Harrowby, but a member for Liverpool, at the Education Department. Disraeli had in the months before the election given some encouragement to those who felt that he might be more sympathetic than the Gladstone government on matters of concern to labour, the continuing problems of the trade unions and the nine-hour movement for a further reduction in the hours of work. One of his links with this world was W.R. Callender, a major figure in the Manchester Conservative party, who had been his host in 1872 and was elected as one of the members for the city in 1874. Callender was one of a number of Tory members representing large cities who, while not appointed to office, were recipients of honours. Callender was given a baronetcy, but he died before he could receive it. Disraeli had no wish to disturb the fiscal compact of midVictorian society, which had to square the middle-class desire for low direct taxes, the working-class pressure for removal of the remaining imposts on consumption and the sensitivity of the landed interest to the rate burden. The prospect of abolishing the income tax, which Gladstone had held out in his election address, was no longer as attractive as it had been. Voters of all classes still wanted cheap defence, but they did not like a weak foreign policy and were susceptible to the argument that weakness was the consequence of cuts in naval and military expenditure. The Ashanti War was one of the legacies of the Gladstone government and in writing to Northcote about it in September 1873, Disraeli had called it 'unprofitable' and 'inglorious' and not to be compared to the Abyssinian expedition of the Conservative government. Strength abroad did not mean pointless imperial adventures. In the same letter advising Northcote about the line he should take in a public speech he had written; 'As to our general policy, it is to uphold the institutions of the country, and to arrest that course of feverish criticism and unnecessary change, too long in vogue. I would not too much insist on our policy being essentially defensive, because they always make out that means being stationary. If pressed about reduction of county suffrage, or unable to avoid it, take the ground that constant change in the distribution of power is in itself an evil; that the measure of 1868

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is only just digested; that it has been followed by the ballot hardly yet tried. ...' 2 In an election speech at Aylesbury he had said: 'I do not think while these social improvements are being made we are to rush readily into acceptance of projects for attempting to supply their social wants by giving them political privileges. That is a very large question and one that has one day to be dealt with, but it must be dealt with not by demagogues but by statesmen.'3 Social improvements were therefore to take precedence over further structural change, but the party was not to be seen to oppose further franchise extension in principle. On no account was the Tory party to slip back into being perceived as 'retrograde'. Even the queen advised her prime minister that if the party was to have a prolonged period in power there should be 'no attempt at a retrograde policy'.4 Disraeli was realistic enough to see that the party had won because many diverse interests and groups had voted for it and to please them all was like squaring the circle. The new supporters from the employing classes were still suspicious that the Tory leader might in fact be 'the enemy of the capitalist class'. The 'combining classes' were viewed with suspicion not only by employers, but also by the landed classes, for they had just experienced the power of rural trade unionism in the shape of Joseph Arch's National Agricultural Labourers Union. What Disraeli wanted for his government was a renewal of the Palmerstonian consensus on a more inclusive basis. In the meantime he was determined to enjoy power and it gave him great satisfaction that he was now at the apex of that great glittering aristocratic society about which he had so often written. To make Selina's husband Master of the Horse, to make dukes, to sort out the scrapes into which the Prince of Wales, 'our Prince Hal', got himself, to manage the queen, these were the appurtenances of his office that, most of the time, gave him real pleasure. It was not only pleasure, for he felt that 'social influences', an aristocracy gathered around a throne, were still politically important, as indeed they were. The exercise of political patronage was in his view essential to government by party and he instinctively disliked the recruitment by examination which the Gladstone government had extended within the public service. To him it smacked too much like a way forward for 'prigs and pedants'. For a man frequently plagued by asthma and gout, he led a very active social life, attending an endless round of receptions, dinners, levees and balls, especially when he hoped to find Selina there.

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Politics, however, remained a serious and unpredictable business. The most important adhesion to the cabinet, from the point of view of the unity of the party, was that of Salisbury, as Indian secretary, and, to a lesser extent, of Carnarvon as colonial secretary. In a cabinet list that Derby had discussed with Disraeli in March 1873, when the Tories might have had to take office, the major omission was Salisbury. After Disraeli's electoral triumph Salisbury could not afford to be left out. Derby was on most issues very clearly on the liberal side of the party, in Church affairs also liberal, almost a sceptic, suspicious of all forms of religious enthusiasm, high or low, and strongly anticlerical. He had therefore little in common with Salisbury, for whom his High Anglicanism was an essential prop against his inner insecurities. Disraeli was much closer to Derby in outlook and the two men were linked by loyalties generated over many years. Both disliked what Disraeli sometimes called 'the sacerdotal party' and Derby the parti prêtre. Yet in style and character Derby and Disraeli differed profoundly, and Salisbury turned out to have much more affinity with the premier. The interplay between these three personalities was to have a great impact on the fate of the Conservative government. In the circumstances it was hardly surprising that the Conservative government did not immediately promote a large legislative programme. Disraeli did not subscribe to the proposition that legislative output was a measure of virtue and had attacked Gladstone for harassing every interest and class with too much legislation. In any case there had not been time to plan a legislative programme, which normally would have been done in the autumn cabinets. But the political process does not stand still and Disraeli was soon confronted with an issue in ecclesiastical politics that put the cohesion of his party under some stress. The spread of ritualism had caused much unease and had led to the appointment of a royal commission, which had reported in 1872. By 1874 Archbishop Tait of Canterbury would wait no longer and introduced a bill to control ritualist practices. It was strongly supported by the queen. Disraeli had told Derby that he thought about 7000 clergy might be ritualists and that 'he was quite prepared to go against them if necessary',5 but he had to step very warily in order not to offend the High Church party in the cabinet, especially Salisbury. When the Archbishop's Public Worship Regulation Bill came before the Commons Gladstone, whose attendance had become somewhat intermittent since his

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defeat, waded in heavily to oppose it. Disraeli could not resist showing his support for the bill and used the phrase 'the mass in masquerade'. In the Lords Salisbury warned his fellow peers against giving way to a 'blustering majority' in the other House, while Disraeli tried to explain away this phrase by calling Salisbury 'a master of gibes and flouts and jeers', in a passage that was otherwise loaded with compliments to his colleague. Fortunately both sides took this word play with good humour and Salisbury did not resign. The bill was not a success, for to seek to control religious practice in the Church of England by a cumbersome process of law opened the way to gratuitous litigation and made martyrs. It confirmed many members of the High Church party in their hostility to Disraeli and turned them against his Balkan policy two years later. Whatever the bill may have gained electorally for the Conservative party in quarters where Protestant feeling was strong, it lost by alienating many moderate members of the clergy and the laity. Gorst warned Disraeli: 'If the Archbishop of Canterbury pursues his career of ecclesiastical legislation, there seems to me great danger of the government being broken up by the High Church Party, as Gladstone's was by the Dissenters.'6 By this time, December 1874, Gorst, feeling ill-rewarded for what he thought was his major contribution to bringing the party to power, had habitually switched into warning mode and it is unlikely that his leader was too perturbed. To beat the Protestant drum was more fashionable than it had been in 1868. The Vatican decrees of 1870 had provoked a backlash. Bismarck's Kulturkampf and, nearer home, Gladstone's pamphlet on the Vatican decrees, published in 1875, were signs of the alarm felt in the most diverse quarters about the Catholic offensive. Cross, who turned out to be the minister most active in domestic legislation, professed himself disappointed that Disraeli had no programme ready when he came to power. He was writing his reminiscences thirty years after the event, when perspectives had greatly changed. What could broadly be called welfare legislation, measures by the state to deal with the social condition of the country, had by then assumed an importance which they did not have in 1874. Apart from the Archbishop's bill the session of 1874 was uneventful. An Intoxicating Liquor Bill extended licensing hours, a small return for the help given by the trade to the Tories. The Liberals were not overborne by a torrent of gin and beer, as Gladstone put it, but the Tory image

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benefited from the perception that the party could be relied on not to come between the working man and his drink. A royal commission was appointed to look into the labour laws. A more immediate gesture to labour was a new factory act reducing the hours of work for women and children to a maximum of 56 and a half per week. It met the demands of the nine-hour movement. Disraeli interfered little with his departmental ministers, which made for a harmonious atmosphere, except when he sensed a political issue. Northcote, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, wanted to keep the income tax at threepence in the pound, but the prime minister insisted on a penny reduction. When Gladstone's 'bribe' to the middle classes, the abolition of the income tax, had been offered in his election address, Northcote had written to his chief: 'whenever we reduce the Income tax we seem to be disturbing the balance between direct and indirect taxation, and disturbing it in favour of the wealthier classes, unless we reduce indirect taxes at the same time'.7 This was exactly what Disraeli now wanted. A penny came off the income tax, the sugar duty was abolished and £1.25 million was allocated to reduce the burden to ratepayers of maintaining lunatic asylums and the police. This fitted in well with Disraeli's aim of re-establishing a social consensus after years of Gladstonian 'harassment'. The session of 1875 became the annus mirabilis of Disraelian social reform, but all historians are now agreed that the social legislation was neither the result of a coherent programme nor of a distinctive ideological orientation different from the prevailing orthodoxy of economic liberalism. It filled the gap left by the absence of constitutional reform. Disraeli's part in it was slight and he sometimes dozed when it was being discussed in cabinet, but he was fully awake when it came to the political implications. In a longer perspective the most important part of the legislation were the labour laws, the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act and the Employers and Workmen Act. The first dealt with the law of picketing, on which the Gladstone government had failed to satisfy the trade unions. The majority recommendations of the royal commission set up by Cross in 1874 would not have satisfied the labour leaders either, but Cross went a long way towards meeting them. The law of conspiracy was altered so as to free trade unions from its operation, as long as the acts involved were not in themselves criminal. The Employers and Workmen Act, now no longer 'Masters and Servants', freed

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unions and their members from criminal prosecutions for breach of contract, except in some public services. The cabinet clearly had difficulties with these proposals. Derby noted in his diary on 29 May 1875: Cabinet in afternoon: we sat 2% hours, discussing the bills which relate to the master and servant, and to the law of conspiracy: differences on point of detail: in principle all were agreed, Salisbury & Carnarvon saying they dislike the proposed legislation, but agree that it cannot be avoided. Disraeli seemed to doubt whether there would be time to go on with the bills this session, and indeed it is late, but we are so pledged to them that they must not be given up without absolute necessity. Both at this and the last cabinet, D. has appeared much exhausted: and today he fell asleep and remained so some minutes: which I never saw him do before. The work is too heavy for a man of 70.8 Derby's account throws doubt on Disraeli's later claim, in a letter to Selina, 'when Secy. X explained his plan to the Cabinet, many were against it and none for it except myself; and it was only in deference to the Prime Minister that a decision was postponed to another day. In the interval; the thing was better understood and managed.' But this was a month after the cabinet at which Derby had seen him asleep and in the meantime he had become euphoric to both sisters: 'This is the greatest measure since the Short Time Act and will gain and retain for the Tories the lasting affection of the working classes.' 'It is one of those measures that root and consolidate a party. We have settled the long and vexatious contest between Capital and Labor.'9 These laws did not earn the undying gratitude of labour, any more than the act of 1867. A more realistic view would be that the labour leaders, after a spell when their relations with the Liberal party were clouded, could return to their normal political allegiance without qualms. From a broader perspective the trade unions in Britain did not, during a vital phase of their development, feel themselves exposed to unremitting hostility from the state, the kind of situation prevalent in most major countries of the European continent. The Conservative party in Britain was not tarred with the brush of blind reaction in the way conservative parties often were in other countries. Disraeli, the image-maker par excellence, had made sure that the reality was not too far out of line with the image he sought to paint. The corpus of Tory

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social legislation in the session of 1875 included bills on Friendly Societies, the form of self-help by insurance that for the working classes took the place of the later welfare state; on Public Health and on the adulteration of food, important when food was increasingly bought and not grown; last but not least housing, Artisans' Dwellings, which facilitated slum clearance by municipal authorities. There was something of a Tory tradition of concern for working-class housing. Shaftesbury was one its protagonists and it was continued by Salisbury. The Artisans' Dwellings Act was 'permissive', something Disraeli later called in another context 'the character of a free people'. In all this legislation a fine line had to be held between state and individual responsibility. Education was another area where Disraeli sought to maintain a tolerably liberal image, while avoiding political damage. Gladstone had inflicted grave damage on his party when he grasped this nettle. Nonconformist disenchantment with the Liberals over the 1870 Education Act contributed powerfully to the Liberal defeat in 1874. Some urban Tories, including some of the Lancashire members and W.H. Smith in London, were, however, in favour of school boards, the most striking innovation of the Act. Smith was a member of the important London Board. For the bulk of Tories from the rural areas school boards were the work of the devil, centres of Radicalism and costly burdens on the rates. Disraeli before 1874 came down firmly on the side of the rural opponents of school boards and did not allow any concern for educational progress to interfere with the business of accentuating Liberal divisions. In 1876 Sandon, a borough member and vice-president of the Committee of Council on Education, persuaded the cabinet to bring an act to enforce and thereby to extend school attendance in rural areas. It was a delicate operation of squaring the progressive intention of diminishing illiteracy among children in the countryside with the subtext of encouraging their attendance at Anglican schools and discouraging the spread of school boards into rural areas. The Tory squirearchy not only hated school boards, they did not want to be deprived of children in their labour force and saw in education in the main an instrument of social control. Disraeli, in so far as he took an interest in the matter, was now on the side of educational progress, anxious to keep the party's liberal image burnished and to avoid anything that looked 'retrograde'.

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The crunch came in late July 1876, when Sandon's bill was in committee. In order to make things palatable to the Tory county members, the cabinet decided that an amendment moved by a backbencher, Albert Pell, a leading Tory county member, should be accepted. It provided that under certain conditions 'unnecessary' school boards could be dissolved. There was great indignation from the Radical, Nonconformist members of the House. Hardy, one of the champions of Church schools in the cabinet, wrote of Henry Richard, the prominent Welsh Nonconformist and representative of the Peace Society, speaking 'in the pettiest spirit of the meanest non conformity, raking the gutters for old stories of intolerance'.10 Disraeli, who had plenty of other things on his mind, including his own impending retirement from the Commons, perhaps from politics altogether, began to waver. Had he been taken for a ride by the 'sacerdotal party'? It required a letter from Salisbury, who had been alerted by Sandon, to make him see that Pell's clause was too popular with his own supporters to be dropped. Salisbury reminded him that these were the men who had supported him earlier in the session over the widely unpopular Royal Titles Bill, making the queen Empress of India. When the affair was all over Disraeli wrote about it to the queen in terms that made him look like the wise overseer of the unruly political kindergarten: It is no use attempting to conciliate the Dissenters. They take all you offer, and, the very next minute, they fly at your throat ... the moment we granted anything to our own friends, there was a fierce cry of 'reaction', which, under the conditions which Mr Disraeli ultimately suggested, was not really well founded. There was a stormy Cabinet one day, which required all Mr Disraeli's experience to guide and assuage.11 He was scarcely exaggerating his own dominance in the first three sessions of this parliament. The opposition was in disarray and Gladstone had formally resigned the Liberal leadership. He put in an occasional appearance, one such, in March 1875, described by Disraeli to the queen as 'the return from Elba: Mr Gladstone not only appeared, but rushed into the debate [on an army bill]. The House, very full, was breathless. The new members trembled and fluttered like small birds when a hawk is in the air.'12 Lord Hartington, the future 8th Duke of Devonshire, became Liberal leader in the Commons, and with Granville

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leading the Liberal peers, the party had once more turned to Whig leaders of the purest milk. Disraeli was cock-a-hoop: 'The political world was never more amusing. I am glad that HartyTarty has won the day. Never was a party in such a position and though I would never confess it to anybody but yourself, never was a man in a prouder position than myself. It never happened before and is not likely to happen again. Only those who are acquainted with the malignity of Gladstone through a rivalship of five and twenty years, can understand this. . . . ' 1 3 But 'the great game' of politics was subject to sudden squalls and storms, as Disraeli knew only too well, and as prime minister it ultimately fell to him to rescue his team from the scrapes into which they got themselves. Still remembered to this day is the Plimsoll incident, when in July 1875, Samuel Plimsoll, the member for Derby, shook his fist at Disraeli in the House. Plimsoll had conducted a long campaign against 'coffin ships', the unseaworthy ships in which many merchant seamen went to their deaths. The campaign struck a chord with the public, for whom sailors filled the place in the hierarchy of labour that later came to be taken by coal miners. Legislation on the merchant marine therefore had a higher public profile than much of the other social legislation proposed by the Conservative government. Unfortunately it was in the hands of Sir Charles Adderley, a charming but ineffectual country gentlemen, whom Disraeli had made president of the Board of Trade. He was no match for Thomas Farrer, the senior civil servant at the Board of Trade, who was also the brother-inlaw of Northcote. Farrer and his civil service colleagues were contemptuous of Plimsoll and his patent cure, the load line. Among the employers who now sat on the Tory back benches there were shipowners, like Edward Bates, member for Plymouth, and David MacIver, member for Birkenhead. The situation was compounded by the Agricultural Holdings Bill, which sought to compensate tenant farmers for the value of unexhausted improvements. It was meant to consolidate the party in rural areas, but in fact aroused the suspicion of many landlords without satisfying the tenant interest. The Plimsoll incident, an early example of headline-grabbing, occurred when Disraeli wanted to drop the Merchant Shipping Bill in order to complete the Agricultural Holdings Bill. The humanitarian concern for the gallant merchant mariners foreshadows the campaign a year later on behalf of the oppressed Christians in the Balkans. Even Tories were so much 'plimsollized' that they could

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not be entirely relied on. 'The Plimsollites, in and out of Parliament, are at me; now cajoling, now the reign of terror,' Disraeli told Selina. 'Mr Secretary Cross, who is naturally a brave man, got so frightened about his chief that I believe there were 1000 constables hid in the bowers of Whitehall Gardens and about.' Naturally our hero emerged victorious, though even he had to admit to Selina 'It was "all right", but it was not glorious.'14 Disraeli was skilful in extricating himself from difficulties to some extent of his own making. It took him another three years to remove Adderley from the Board of Trade. It was observed that at crucial moments he was tired and feeble and not up to his usual form. Henry Lucy, the well-known parliamentary journalist, compared him to a fading prima donna, 'so the PM, aiming to be gaily audacious, misses the exact pitch and becomes simply rude'.15 Much of the treatment for his gout and bronchitic asthma prescribed by his physician Sir William Gull, such as large quantities of port wine, would now be regarded as counterproductive, but his resilience was still remarkable. When in November 1875 the autumn cabinets were considering the programme for the next session, Derby noted that Disraeli did not want to have a large programme, as opposed to Cross, who mildly hinted that there were still many subjects to consider. D. is unequalled in his judgment as to what line the public will expect us to take on a difficult question: and his skill is also conspicuous in getting out of all embarrassment: but he dislikes detail, is easily weaned by it, and cares little about the preparation of bills while the session is still distant. He is in good health and excellent spirits, but visibly an old man.16 Dealing with the queen, 'the Faery' as he now always called her in his private letters, and with the affairs of royalty in general, consumed a great deal of energy. Relations between the monarch and her minister were given a high profile by the conferment on the queen of the title of Empress of India in 1876. It fitted with the ideas Disraeli had often expressed about engaging the imagination of Eastern peoples. The pressure to proceed at the beginning of the session of 1876 came from the queen and the timing was not convenient for the prime minister. Disraeli told Derby: 'the reason of it is that her daughter will have imperial rank, and she cannot bear to be in a lower position ...'.17

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Disraeli was in a more than usually weak position to resist her, for she had in 1876 opened parliament in person for the first time in many years. He had to put much of his political credit on the line to get the Royal Titles Bill passed. It was unpopular across party and class lines and the title 'empress' was felt to be unEnglish. The queen was angered by the opposition to the imperial title and Disraeli had to handle her with large doses of obsequious flattery, in which even she may have discovered the odd pinch of salt. 'He is too submissive & given to flattery in such matters,' Derby felt.18 The premier knew, like all members of the political class in both parties, that the queen was the inescapable coping stone of the system they were operating. For the Conservative party, in the image that Disraeli had sought to give it, the monarchy was doubly essential. In fawning upon the self-willed, often preposterous, but highly experienced and not unintelligent woman on the throne Disraeli was doing more than consulting his own advantage and convenience or satisfying his romantic instincts. He was resuscitating the monarchy after a phase of damaging unpopularity and laying the groundwork for the imperial monarchy that reached its full fruition in the golden and diamond jubilees of the queen. He told Salisbury with regard to the imperial title: 'What may have been looked upon as an ebullition of individual vanity may bear the semblance of deep and organised policy.'19 There is of necessity an element of makebelief in the relationship between a first minister, who wields real power, and a constitutional monarch. When circumstances absolutely required it he could bring her down to earth by hinting that she might have to find other ministers. The controversy over the imperial title coincided in the House of Commons with the ratification of the purchase of the Suez Canal shares, Disraeli's first major coup in foreign policy. The word 'imperialism' entered the political discourse, in the press mostly in a pejorative sense. In the rational liberal mind it conjured up nightmares of an overweening minister using the imperial crown to dazzle the impressionable populace. For its opponents it was 'caesarism', foreshadowing what in the twentieth century became plebiscitary dictatorships built round charismatic leaders. In April 1876 the Spectator declared in an article entitled 'English imperialism': It is not easy to realise that such a policy as that of the 'Imperialists' ... should have ... any root ... in these

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islands. ... Mr Disraeli conceived very early in his career the notion that such a policy, - a policy which should magnify the Crown on the one hand, and the wishes of the masses on the other, and should make light of the constitutional limitations on either, - was still possible in Europe, and might even have a chance in England. ... 20 Disraeli's main concern was to assert British power and prestige. Britain had no army to compete with those of the continental powers, but she had a navy and a far-flung empire. India especially was a possession that added greatly to Britain's weight in the world. Before returning to power in 1874 Disraeli's attacks on Liberal policies of disintegration and Liberal cosmopolitanism created the presumption that Conservative foreign policy would be different, but he had been no more specific in offering policies than he had been on the home front. Traditionally prime ministers regarded the Foreign Office as the department of state in which they had a constitutional stake. Derby, for all his personal weaknesses, was politically a powerful foreign secretary. Disraeli was bound to him by personal and political ties so complex that even he would have found it difficult to explain them to himself, let alone to others. When the queen complained of 'that very peculiar person Lord D.' who was 'very difficult to manage', Disraeli told her that he had 'adjured him in the approaching audience, to do justice to himself, and step out of his icy panoply'.21 He devoted much effort to bolstering Derby's self-esteem, damaged by, among other things, his father's overpowering personality. But he ran Derby, like all his ministers, on a very loose rein, and made less use of the prime minister's prerogative on foreign affairs than he might have done. Derby for his part was well aware of the gulf that separated him as a personality from his leader, in spite of their close relationship over a generation. When in the early stages of the Balkan crisis reports were circulating about differences between himself and his chief, Derby wrote in his diary, on 1 July 1876: The reports have their origin in the obvious difference between our respective points of view and our style of handling such subjects: D. being a little too anxious to excite interest, to astonish or puzzle his audience by an air of mystery, and generally put on an appearance of greater activity than is either being shown or than there is need of. I on the other hand am supposed, perhaps with justice, to

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be disposed to make as little as possible of what we do. But in regard to the action to be taken we are absolutely as one: and I see no reason why we should not continue so. Among D.'s little peculiarities is a dislike to allow any foreign matter to be discussed in cabinet. ... 22 The purchase of the Suez Canal shares was fully discussed in cabinet and Derby was entirely behind the action taken. Others, notably Northcote as Chancellor of the Exchequer, were more hesitant and worried about the size of the Rothschild commission. The possibility of shares coming into the market had been rumoured for some time and Disraeli was no doubt right in claiming that he had given the matter much thought. In itself it was a limited operation, securing 44 per cent of the original issue, therefore not even a controlling interest in the Suez Canal Company. But Disraeli commended it publicly as 'a political transaction, and one which I believe is calculated to strengthen the Empire'. Abroad it did give an impression of British imperial power and assertiveness. In the long run it proved a step towards British control of Egypt, a development which Disraeli himself was not anxious to hasten. At home the move was popular and showed that a narrow 'economical' approach did not always carry the day with the public. The crisis in the Balkans was already in the making. The revolt of Christians against Turkish rule began near Mostar, in BosniaHercegovina, in July 1875 and quickly became a problem for the policy-makers of the European great powers. Just before the Suez Canal shares came on to the market Disraeli was discussing the Turkish problem with Derby. The latter wrote in his diary on 3 November 1875: 'He is full of the Turkish business, thinks the end is coming, does not see how the power of the Sultan is to be propped up: agrees with me that we cannot treat the case of the bondholders as in any way exceptional, but thinks the bankruptcy will affect English feeling about Turkey so as to make a continuance of the old policy impossible.'23 Disraeli approached the crisis with few preconceptions, but also without any preconceived strategy, something he never had any great faith in. He would even then have agreed with Salisbury, who eighteen months later warned against 'sticking to the carcasses of dead policies', namely the old policy of propping up Turkey.24 Six months later, Disraeli wrote to Derby: 'our scheme shd ... be founded on the status quo but that a liberal interpretation shd be

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placed on that phrase so that we may create other vassal states. I think it would be better not to increase the territories of Montenegro or Servia. ...' 25 Disraeli therefore was not pro-Turk nor opposed to autonomy for the nationalities in the Balkans, but he did not sympathize with the emotional hostility to the Turks or the enthusiasm for the Balkan Christians of so many others. He doubted that ethnically mixed areas like Bosnia could be turned into viable states. 'Fancy autonomy for Bosnia, with a mixed population: autonomy for Ireland wd. be less absurd, for there are more Turks in proportion to Xtians in Bosnia than Ulster v. the three other provinces ...,' he told Selina in October 1875.26 His knowledge of the Balkans was, however, no more than sketchy. His main concern was to assert the British national interest and to be seen to be doing so. He would have liked an understanding with Bismarck, but when this seemed to be on offer in the early months of 1876 Derby's suspicions and halfheartedness allowed the chance to slip by. He would have collaborated with Russia on a scheme of partitioning the Ottoman Empire, if this could have been secured on reasonable terms: 'It is wise that we shd take the lead in it [partition]. Our chance of success will be greater because from us, it will be unexpected,' he wrote to Derby in September 1876.27 Salisbury, according to a memorandum drafted by his nephew A.J. Balfour in 1880, was critical of Disraeli's lack of a clear strategy in the crisis: 'As a politician he was exceedingly short-sighted though very clear-sighted. He neither could nor would look far ahead, or attempt to balance remote possibilities; though he rapidly detected the difficulties of the immediate situation and found the easiest if not the best solution for them. As head of a cabinet his fault was want of firmness. ... a statesman whose only final political principle was that the party must on no account be broken up. ...' The most telling criticism was that 'Dizzy shrank to the last from insisting on anything to which Lord Derby would have refused his assent'.28 Disraeli feared the electoral consequences of Derby's departure, but he seems beyond that to have been disabled in his dealings with his foreign secretary by the deep-seated instincts of a retainer of the House of Stanley. Instead he vented his frustrations by frequent epistolatory diatribes against the Foreign Office and against the major ambassadors. Despite such irritations, pressure of work and ill health, he was still enjoying himself. To Selina he wrote, on

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20 June 1876, as the crisis was getting into high gear: 'I am pretty well, though I have more to do than generally falls to the lot of mortals. However, it is interesting and after rates and taxes and shipping Bills, la haute politique is refreshing: worth living for. I have little else to live for unhappily.'29 Up to this point the government's handling of the Balkan crisis had caused little controversy. Disraeli had reluctantly assented to the Andrassy note, pressing reforms on the Porte, at the beginning of 1876. His most high-profile initiative had been the refusal, in May 1876, to be associated with the Berlin Memorandum, a proposal sponsored by Russia, Austria and Germany, for an armistice between the insurgents in Bosnia and the Turkish government. There was obvious objection to the substance of the Memorandum, but Disraeli was chiefly exercised by the fact that Britain had not been more fully consulted. He had since his return to office sought to enhance British influence in face of the dominance in Europe of the three 'Northern Courts', also known as the Dreikaiserbund. The danger was that by separating herself from the three powers Britain would encourage Turkish intransigence, but for the moment it seemed the right decision. 'I do not remember to have seen a cabinet which was so entirely of one mind: this is lucky, for our decision will be much criticised, though I believe on the whole it will be popular,' Derby noted in his diary on 16 May.30 When news of Turkish atrocities broke in June, Disraeli's instinctive refusal to respond to scare-mongering, as well as lack of accurate information, led him into a series of pooh-poohing statements, which later rebounded on him. Particularly remembered was the phrase he used in the Commons on 10 July: 'I doubt ... that torture has been practised on a great scale among an Oriental people who seldom, I believe, resort to torture, but generally terminate their connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner.' It raised a laugh, but was not meant to be a joke, merely the kind of baroque form of speech that had become a habit with him. Three weeks later he referred to the reports about atrocities as 'coffee-house babble'. Such phrases became hostages to fortune when shortly afterwards the campaign against his policies got going in the country, fuelled by ever more specific reports about the atrocities committed in Bulgaria. He made his last speech in the Commons, in defence of these policies, on 11 August, sounding again the high imperial note.

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Turkey was not being upheld 'from blind superstition, and from a want of sympathy with the highest aspirations of humanity ... our duty at this critical moment is to maintain the Empire of England'.31 As he stood for a moment behind the speaker's chair, surveying for a last time the scene of his triumphs over forty years, there were tears in his eyes. His decision to continue in office, but to retreat to the Lords as Earl of Beaconsfield, showed that he could not let go at such a moment. A year earlier it might have been possible for him to hand over to Derby, but by now the foreign secretary, though his standing with the general public was still high, would have had difficulty in obtaining enough support among his colleagues. Neither Hardy nor Northcote would have been acceptable to the cabinet as its head. To choose between them for the lead in the Commons only was difficult enough. Hardy was the better debater, but his High Anglican views were an obstacle. Thus the choice fell upon Northcote, an eminently reasonable politician, but when Gladstone returned as prime minister four year later, Northcote proved no match for him. Gladstone, for the moment only a private member, had voiced his first, mild criticism of the government's Balkan policies on 31 July. During August he became convinced that the growing popular movement over the Bulgarian atrocities represented the return of 'a virtuous passion' and required his support. At the beginning of September he published his pamphlet Bulgarian Atrocities and the Question of the East, which by the end of the month had sold 200,000 copies. His return to active politics was proof to his opponents that his retirement had always been hypocritical, but his belated association with the agitation shows clearly that he was drawn into it somewhat reluctantly. His recommendations for policy in the Balkans were more cautious than the moral fervour of his denunciation of the government. On the other hand Disraeli's presence at the head of the government greatly enhanced Gladstone's commitment to the opposition. The political, personal and emotional gulf between the two men now became a veritable chasm. Gladstone saw Disraeli now as a purveyor of pure evil, a destroyer of all sound principles in politics. Like many others he felt that the prime minister was engaged in a pro-Turkish conspiracy fuelled by his Judaic feeling, the only sincere sentiment in his 'profoundly falsified nature'. It was total demonization. Disraeli's reciprocation of hatred was perhaps a shade less irrational. He saw Gladstone as a hypocrite, 'a ceaseless Tartuffe from the

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beginning. That sort of man does not get mad at 70,' he told Selina.32 Others saw Gladstone as clinically insane, not least the queen. The Bulgarian atrocity campaign and the presence on either side of the divide of two such dominant figures as Gladstone and Disraeli had a distorting effect on the development of the diplomatic crisis. In the longer run the most important result was that atrocitarianism contributed to the fragmentation and weakening of the Liberal movement that had been dominant for so long. Liberal intellectuals began to have doubts about popular progress. They began to wonder whether the Gladstonian faith in the 'virtuous passion' of the masses was perhaps not a form of self-deception, or even worse, of demagoguery. The split of 1886 over Home Rule was dimly foreshadowed, as was the birth of Liberal imperialism. For the moment, however, the prevailing sentiment among the intelligentsia, even among those not particularly associated with liberalism, was profound distrust of Disraeli, 'one of the most inveterate liars in Christendom', as Canon MacColl, one of the leaders of the atrocity campaign and friend of Gladstone, called him.33 In Christendom, but not of it, that was the rub. What Disraeli had written in the past, about Judaism, Christianity, Moslems and the Orient came back to haunt him. His musings about race were given a sharper edge in the age of Darwin. Race was now biological determinism. The populist anti-Semitism of his youth was transformed into an ideology that made the Jews responsible for most of the pains and shortcomings, real and imagined, of modernity. To those who wanted to believe in a Jewish world conspiracy Disraeli, along with the Rothschilds, was grist to the mill. Among the leaders of the campaign the historian E.A. Freeman took the theme of Disraeli, 'the ever lying Jew', foisting a 'Hebrew policy' upon a Christian polity, furthest into the realm of scurrility and paranoia. Freeman was one of the many High Anglicans prominent in the atrocity campaign. They felt a special affinity with the Greek Orthodox Christians in the Balkans, but many of them were equally motivated by hatred of Disraeli. Freeman was one of the historians and constitutional lawyers whose work was underpinning the idea of a special Anglo-Saxon mission in the development of freedom and free institutions. This mission was falsified by the meretricious showmanship of the alien Jew who had temporarily highjacked a noble cause. The Bulgarian atrocity campaign might not have taken off to the extent it did, and would certainly have evoked

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less passion, had not Disraeli supplied so ideal a target figure. He and Gladstone, both of them with some reluctance, became icons, radiating their message long after the immediate crisis was over. Both were victims of a political shouting-match: their messages came across in crude and distorted form, all moderation or qualification drowned out. Disraeli's elevation to the peerage entailed a by-election in Buckinghamshire. It became the first test of opinion after Gladstone had thrown his weight behind the atrocity campaign. In a speech at Aylesbury on the eve of polling Disraeli made his public response to the agitation by warning that the noble sentiments of the English people might be taken advantage of 'by designing politicians' for 'their sinister ends'. The Tories held the seat with a reduced majority. There was a sigh of relief among the government's supporters, from the queen downwards. Their confidence had been shaken by the size and range of the agitation, but this was counterbalanced by the determination not to be seen to be blown off course by a spasm of popular emotion puffed up by 'the Greenwich Tartuffe'. Disraeli and Derby were at one in refusing to admit that they had anything to regret in their past policies or bore any responsibility for Turkish atrocities. In private Disraeli had to concede that the atrocity campaign had cramped the style of British diplomacy. It might have been better if he had more publicly condemned the atrocities and shown sympathy for the victims, as some of his colleagues wanted him to do. As early as 1 September 1876 he had written to Selina: 'Everything has gone against us - but nothing so much as the "Bulgarian atrocities" which have changed the bent of opinion in England as regards Turkey and which are worked not merely by enthusiasts, but of course by the Opposition and by Russia's agents, though the Government have no more to do with the "atrocities" than the man in the moon.'34 Threats addressed to St Petersburg on behalf of Turkish integrity had for the moment lost their credibility. Disraeli had moments of discouragement, but on the whole his luck held through the many twists and turns of this prolonged crisis. In the autumn of 1876 the agitation in the country was blowing itself out and even many Liberals, including the two leaders Hartington and Granville, had never had much sympathy for it. In the diplomatic poker game with Russia Disraeli did his best to impart a robust tone to the initiatives of his foreign secretary, who was fearful of being too provocative. When in his

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speech at the Lord Mayor's dinner in November 1876 Disraeli declared that 'although the policy of England is peace, there is no country so well prepared for war as our own', Gladstone and other leaders of the atrocity campaign were outraged. A month later they held a meeting at St James's Hall attended by a glittering array of luminaries, including Lord Acton, Charles Darwin, Anthony Trollope, John Ruskin, William Morris as well as many politicians, among them Tories like Shaftesbury. Only Disraeli could have brought such a diverse crew together. Hartington did not approve and Granville also stayed away, though he congratulated Gladstone on his speech. It was a moderate speech, but what drew more comment was his appearance arm-in-arm with the glamorous Mme Novikov, the ally of Ignatiev, the champion of pan-Slavism among the Russian leaders. It is unlikely that the meeting helped the aims of Gladstone and the atrocity campaigners. Hartington's verdict was: 'Nothing was said, even by Gladstone, to repudiate the extravagances of Freeman and one or two others, and the whole thing seems to me to be more or less discredited by them. ...' 35 The queen was incandescent with rage and told Disraeli that 'the Attorney-General ought to be set at these men'.36 To Selina he wrote: 'The Faery was charming to me. She knows all about Mrs Thistlewayte [sic]. She really thinks G. mad.' Mrs Thistlethwaite was the reformed courtesan with whom Gladstone had a warm friendship, and with whom he had dinner immediately after the meeting.37 The immediate concern at this moment was the impending conference at Constantinople, which was to settle the future of the Balkans and to which Lord Salisbury was the British delegate. The calling of the conference followed the cessation of hostilities between the Turks and the Serbs at the end of October 1876. Salisbury's sympathies for the Balkan Christians were well known and his mission to Constantinople was welcomed by Gladstone and others. If they thought he was the man to checkmate what was in their view Disraeli's bellicose Russophobe approach to the problem they were mistaken. Salisbury and Disraeli were drawn together by their realism. Salisbury might have wanted the carcass of Palmerstonian policies more completely jettisoned, but he knew the practical difficulties in the way of a Balkans solution based on nationality, nor would he take Russian good faith for granted. His main difference from Disraeli was that he wanted to do nothing to prolong the Turkish rule over the Christian peoples of the Balkans and he was

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unwilling to become allied to the Turks. The Constantinople conference failed, largely because the Turks refused to accept anything that looked like the end of their effective sovereignty in the Balkans. It is hard to tell whether a more unequivocal signal from the British government that they could expect no help would have shifted them. Even after the failure of the conference Disraeli by no means drew the curtain on an understanding with Russia. He wanted to provide her with 'a golden bridge', for if it came to a Russo-Turkish war he had little hope that the Turks could hold their own. He wanted to avoid such a war, for he knew that direct intervention by Britain on the side of the Turks was not feasible, given the state of British public opinion. Once the Russo-Turkish war broke out, at the end of April 1877, the management of the home front, parliament, party, public opinion, became less of a problem for Disraeli. Gladstone was unable, in May, to get his own party to support five strongly anti-Turk resolutions and even a compromise motion detaching British interests from support of the Ottoman Empire was rejected by the unusually large majority of 131. Gladstone was driven to seek extra-parliamentary support among Radicals when he addressed the opening conference of the National Liberal Federation in Birmingham at the end of the month. To keep such company did not commend him to the Whig-Liberal majority in the parliamentary party. His antics greatly helped to maintain Tory unity in the country. It was more difficult to obtain a decision inside the cabinet on what to do in face of the constantly changing situation. Disraeli's difficulty was that a compromise consonant with British interests had failed to emerge and most military experts thought a Turkish defeat likely. Cairns reported Disraeli as feeling uneasy: 'It may come right: but it may come very wrong. The country has left us to guard "British interests": if anything miscarries as to them, no mercy will be shown to us either by foes or friends on the score that we were hampered by the House of Commons. With a majority of 130, it will be said, we might have done anything.'38 In July, before a crucial cabinet, Derby reported him as saying 'that a violent antiRussian agitation is about to break out, & carry all before it ... he had good intelligence from agents in various parts'.39 Again and again it was the state of public opinion that was the overriding consideration for the premier. Well into the autumn the successful resistance of the Turks to the Russian advance around Plevna gave Disraeli some room for

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manoeuvre. He was a resourceful rather than a strong prime minister. In retrospect Salisbury blamed this 'want of firmness' on his excessive regard for party unity, but it was precisely this awareness that he derived his power from party that made Disraeli into a modern politician. As it was, he ducked and weaved between the constantly shifting opinions of his colleagues. Since he and they were having to react to events which they could only indirectly influence, it was not an inappropriate response. Every now and then he brought the influence of the hawkish, sometimes nearly hysterical queen to bear on his cabinet. She complained that England was being reduced to a 'subservient, second-rate, cotton-spinning power' and even threatened abdication. He was driven to all sorts of subterfuges, to which she lent her assistance, such as communicating behind Derby's back with the Tsar. The fall of Constantinople to the Russians might spell the end of the ministry, but as long as it was not immediately impending there was room for endless prevarication and dissension. Throughout these proceedings Disraeli was frequently ill and talked of resignation. Since Derby and Salisbury regarded themselves as his most probable successors, their postures must have been influenced by his possible voluntary or involuntary departure. In fact the pressure of events seems to have had some therapeutic effect on him. After a discussion between him, Cairns and Hardy, the latter wrote in his diary: 'B. is poorly and fancies his bronchial affection asthma. He put it aside and talked eagerly.'40 A cabinet on 5 October 1877 considered the various options in case the Russians should resume their advance. The prime minister delivered a prepared statement 'with an air of solemnity which he sometimes puts on', Derby confided to his diary. Much of what he said was reasonable enough, but he also lapsed into the kind of conspiracy theory that was characteristic of him. 'Her [Russia's] early successes had been gained by bribery of Turkish officers. (This is a favourite theory with Disraeli: I [Derby] know no evidence in favour of it.)'41 Did he really believe it or was it merely another way of adding to the mystification, excitement and solemnity? The scale of possible diplomatic and military moves was wide, as it had been all along, ranging from doing nothing to going to war, with naval moves from Besika Bay through the Dardanelles and land occupations of the Gallipoli Peninsula somewhere in between. Differences of opinion were inevitable and imperfect memories of what had been done or had

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failed to be done at the time of the Crimean War hung heavily over all deliberations. Disraeli joked about six parties in the cabinet, ranging from war at any price to peace at any price. Lady Derby and her husband were among his most serious problems. Lady Derby was leaking the secrets of the cabinet and its disunity to Count Shuvalov, the Russian ambassador. The gulf between her husband and the prime minister was now wide. Both men had for long been aware of it, but their long friendship made them deeply reluctant to face its consequences. It was also the case that Derby's determination to avoid war at almost any price was not far removed from the opinions of the commercial and business classes, who cared for the national prestige, but were not prepared to pay a high price for it in taxes or disturbance of trade. Disraeli said in cabinet that 'the upper & the working classes were united against Russia. The middle classes would always be against a war: but fortunately the middle classes did not now govern.'42 In talking to Derby and his wife Disraeli usually tried to gain their sympathy by describing his difficulties with the queen: 'He said he had great trouble with the Queen: she had written in the most violent 6c unreasonable way, and he had been obliged to write her "a very stiff letter" in reply: but she had taken it well, & acquiesced,' Derby noted in his diary on 21 November 1877.43 When after the fall of Plevna to the Russians on 9 December 1877 the crisis reached an acute stage, Derby appealed to Salisbury for support: 'I have no feeling towards the Premier but one of personal friendship ... but his views are different from mine ... not in detail but in principle. He believes thoroughly in "prestige" as all foreigners do, and would think it (quite sincerely) in the interests of the country to spend 200 millions on a war if the result was to make foreign States think more highly of us as a military power.'44 Whether Derby really regarded Disraeli as a foreigner is not clear, but it is clear enough that a strong prime minister would long before have dispensed with such a foreign secretary. At the end of January 1878 the cabinet agreed to move the fleet through the Dardanelles, to ask parliament for a £6 million vote of credit and to negotiate an alliance with Austria. For Derby the move of the fleet was the last straw and he resigned, Carnarvon joining him. At the cabinet on 23 January a letter from Sir William Hart Dyke, the chief whip, was read out which expressed the firm view that 'immediate action possibly resulting in war' would be backed by a united party.45

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It confirmed the view of opinion that had reached Disraeli from many quarters. He knew about jingoism, a new word in the language, and had heard about the famous music hall song from Corry, who had seen The Great MacDermott at the London Pavilion in May 1877. It was still very difficult to get rid of Derby, who regarded his presence in the cabinet as essential to peace. Only two days after Dyke's letter had been read out in cabinet the normally level-headed Northcote told Disraeli of alarming accounts of the effect of Derby's resignation on the feeling of Tory members from Lancashire and Cheshire. 'Dyke has not given me any names, but he says the feeling is much worse than he believed it to be when he spoke to y o u . . . ,'46 In Liverpool, on Derby's doorstep, feeling was in favour of avoiding war through firmness. This was the view of two leading Tories, Edward Whitley and Arthur Forwood, both of them at one time mayors of the city. Disraeli managed to fend off Derby's departure once more, for the order to send the fleet through the Dardanelles was for the moment countermanded. The queen was appalled when Derby withdrew his resignation. When at the end of March troops were sent to the Mediterranean and reserves called up, Derby finally did go. His resignation was, according to Forwood, 'not bewailed' in Liverpool.47 Derby and his wife were subjected to the most scurrilous vilification in many quarters. He was rumoured to have raped a fifteen-year-old working girl in Liverpool48 and she was said to be Shuvalov's mistress. Derby joined the Liberals before the 1880 election, having for long felt uncomfortable with the religious intolerance and bellicosity in the Tory party. It no longer mattered much, for Salisbury, who succeeded Derby, had now moved firmly into support for Disraeli's position of deterring Russia by a show of force. All the signs were that public opinion at large was now also strongly behind the government and that Gladstone was swimming against the tide. When in April 7000 Indian troops were moved to Malta, it was conclusive proof to St Petersburg that the British government meant business. It was a vindication of Disraeli's long-held view of the importance of India to British power. The move was made without prior parliamentary sanction, but the opposition failed to move a motion of no confidence. But the suspicions aroused at the time of the Royal Titles Bill about its caesarist implications were revived. The words which Disraeli put in the mouth of Fakredeen in Tancred were remembered: 'Let the Queen of the

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English collect a great fleet... and transfer the seat of her empire from London to Delhi. There she will find an immense empire ready made ... besides which she gets rid of the embarrassment of her Chambers!'49 In the triumphant resolution of the crisis in 1878 without war luck played as large a part as good management. Three years before Disraeli had told Selina that it might fall to him to solve the Near Eastern question. It was beyond permanent solution but he had successfully reasserted the British interest in it. The Congress of Berlin, which kept him in the German capital for over a month, was a kind of apotheosis for him. The outline of a settlement had been negotiated before the Congress met and much of the credit for it must go to Salisbury. The key element in the settlement was that Russia was forced to revise the Treaty of San Stefano that she had imposed on the Turks on 3 March. The large Bulgaria envisaged in this treaty had access to the Aegean, including the important city of Salonika. The Anglo-Russian conventions signed at the end of May confined the autonomous principality to an area north of the Balkan range of mountains. As it was Bulgaria did not become the Russian satellite that was feared, but Disraeli succeeded in his aim of keeping Russia out of the Mediterranean. The other major arrangement concluded before the Congress was the Cyprus Convention, under which Turkey ceded the island to Britain in return for a defensive alliance. Disraeli rather extravagantly described Cyprus to the queen as 'the key of Western Asia'. These and other agreements, such as the Austrian occupation of Bosnia-Hercegovina, still required ratification at Berlin and this was not a foregone conclusion. It was not initially expected that Disraeli would go to Berlin and the queen tried to persuade him to stay at home for health reasons. It was not an occasion he was prepared to miss and his ultimate authority was needed to reinforce the British position. For the benefit of the queen he kept a journal in which he recorded the glittering progression of banquets and receptions that was as much part of the diplomatic process as the formal meetings of the Congress. At Vienna sixty years earlier the Congress had danced, this one ate. Disraeli was now at the centre of a stage that he had conjured up as a young man in his novels. The demand for his books was great in Berlin and not a little of the fascination he exercised derived from the fact that here was a man who had realized his dream like few others. The other

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central figure was Bismarck, whom Disraeli had last met in London in 1862, just before he rose to power in Prussia. The air was thick with distrust between them until they came face to face again. Bismarck's sensational success as a man of power had been achieved at the cost of a miasma of distrust that surrounded him in whatever he did. Bismarck knew little about Disraeli except that he was 'a romantically oratorical Semite' of doubtful reputation. In fact they got on famously, two men of transcendent stature, between whom there was no need for pretence. 'I could listen to his Rabelaisian monologues: endless revelations of things he ought not to mention. ... His characters of persons extremely piquant. Recklessly frank.'50 They were both men of outstanding egocentricity, unperturbed by scruples, but Disraeli lacked the element of vicious vengefulness that often disfigured Bismarck. As they smoked together, Disraeli giving 'the last blow to my shattered constitution', they were united by their cynicism about the great affairs of this world, but also by the knowledge that even for the greatest of men, such as they were, power was fragile and finite. Both of them had been Byronic figures as young men, but had disciplined themselves in the quest for power. Disraeli probably got more out of the Congress than Bismarck, whose 'honest brokerage' left one of his allies, Russia, with a sense of grievance. The one major concession Disraeli had to make was to leave the Tsar's acqusitions on the east side of the Black Sea, Kars and Batoum, in Russian hands. This was unwelcome in the prevailing mood of Russophobia among much of the British public, but it was more than counterbalanced by the acquisition of Cyprus, which was made public only at the end of the Congress. Salisbury had earlier joked to Northcote, weighed down with the cares of being temporarily in charge in London, that the announcement would spark a four-hour speech by Gladstone 'on the selfishness of England & the purity of Russian motives'. The Daily News would conclusively prove 'that the idea of taking Cyprus could only have occurred to the Semitic instincts of the Prime Minister'. Dyke, the chief whip, described Gladstone as rabid, when the Cyprus news broke, looking 'as if he must tear something or somebody to pieces or expire with rage'.51 He called the Cyprus Convention 'an insane covenant'. Disraeli, not 'pretending to be as competent a judge of insanity as his opponent', called him, in a famous phrase, 'a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity'.52 This exchange of pleasantries caused Gladstone to

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write a private letter to his adversary, claiming never to have made any personal attacks. Gladstone's sensitivity contrasts strikingly with Disraeli's equanimity in face of the avalanche of personal, often anti-Semitic abuse directed against him. For the moment it was not majority opinion. Disraeli and Salisbury returned to widespread plaudits, though the welcome in Downing Street, at which the prime minister announced 'peace with honour', owed something to careful staging by Lord Henry Lennox. The queen offered a dukedom or marquisate and the Garter. Disraeli accepted only the Garter and insisted on Salisbury having it as well. His image as the champion of British imperial greatness was now indelibly fixed, even if it was for a section of the public a negative image.

10 Anticlimax 1878-1881

After the apotheosis of the Berlin Congress, it was downhill nearly all the way for Disraeli. The question has often been raised why he did not capitalize on the high position he had achieved for himself and his government by calling an election. As a peer he would not, according to the conventions of the day, be expected to take an active part in an election campaign, but there was anxiety that his health would prevent him from undertaking even the minimum required. In the autumn of 1877 he had been persuaded to put himself in the hands of Dr Kidd, a homeopathic practitioner, whose treatment of his patient, which amongst other things meant switching from port to claret, was more suitable than that handed out by Sir William Gull. What could be done, in the current state of medicine, for a man of over seventy with Disraeli's conditions - Bright's disease, kidney problems, as well as gout, bronchitis and asthma - was limited. His performance in Berlin was in the circumstances remarkable, even though Kidd had to be sent out at one stage and Disraeli only just made it to the final signing. Relentless socializing, even if he was abstemious in food and drink, as well as his lengthy and still sparkling reports home show how much he throve on excitement. Anyhow, there was still no one who could credibly replace him. Salisbury had not yet attained the position in the party or the country he later had, Hardy was now in the Lords as Cranbrook and was sidelined. If Disraeli had died, the queen would probably have had to turn to Northcote, but he had shown weakness as leader in the Commons. He was not a good debater and was too often apologetic. While in Berlin Disraeli had complained to Salisbury about their colleagues back in England as 'middle-class men afraid of responsibility'. Salisbury reminded his chief that at least Northcote was not middle-class,

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to which Disraeli replied that 'he had been early made a bureaucrat and had never lost the feeling'.1 In the spring reshuffle he had made the somnolent Duke of Northumberland Lord Privy Seal in order to maintain a balance between peers and commoners in his cabinet. The Tory party was still the landed party and its upper echelons were solidly aristocratic, but it had an increasingly important middle-class tail which might soon wag the dog. It was not a prospect Disraeli relished, but he was not fool enough to think he could stop it. The advice he received from the whips and party managers was against an immediate election and such evidence as there is suggests that they were probably right. A by-election at Newcastle-under-Lyme in August 1878 went decisively against the Tories, which at the very least shows that the surge of opinion in favour of the government, which the triumph in Berlin had led most people to expect, was not overwhelming. Later, after the defeat of 1880, Disraeli put most of the blame for it on 'hard times' and it is likely that 'bad trade' was all along more important to the standing of the government than any triumphs or defeats abroad. The by-election record of the government in its first four years was much better than that of the preceding Gladstone government. In the last two years there were more losses, but even then some notable successes. The runes were exceptionally difficult to read. Even if public opinion polls had existed, they might not have been very useful, for voting power was still so unevenly distributed. The pundits were much influenced by the events that the press was able to reflect, the Bulgarian agitation, the Berlin triumph, and yet to come, the Midlothian campaign, and, most persistently, the ebb and flow of the parliamentary struggle. Here the record of the government looked quite strong. Whereas the Gladstone government 'mechanical majority' of 110 in 1869 had been steadily eroded, the Disraeli government's overall majority of 50 had frequently been exceeded. In these circumstances there was no case for a premature dissolution, which would have gone against the practice of the day. It was, however, less reassuring that the domestic legislative activity of the government had ground to a virtual halt by 1877, partly owing to the tactics of obstruction practised by the Irish members. As long as Isaac Butt led the Home Rule party its existence was of real advantage to the Conservatives, but now a more radical Irish party, of which Parnell would emerge as the leader, was in the making.

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Ireland's descent into disorder and revolt was mainly a consequence of the agricultural depression that was also affecting farming areas elsewhere in the British isles. The decline of British agriculture was to prove permanent. The deep depression of industry and commerce, which accompanied it, also foreshadowed a permanent loss of industrial supremacy. For the Tory party the agricultural depression struck close to home. Rent rolls were falling and even Disraeli's colleagues were feeling the pinch. When it came to raising subscriptions to the party fund for the coming election, some cited the fall in income from their estates as a reason for failing to match their previous generosity. If it is possible to pinpoint a single year as the beginning of the decline of the territorial aristocracy, then 1879 was it. Cheap imports from the New World were bringing about that ruin of British agriculture which had been predicted in 1846 but had been postponed for forty years. For the first time the orthodoxy of free trade was being seriously questioned and the cry of 'reciprocity' was heard. The hard-pressed manufacturing interest was also attracted by 'reciprocity', at a time when important markets like the United States and Germany were putting up tariff walls. A Fair Trade League, appealing particularly to exporters of manufactured goods, was making its appearance and was infiltrating Tory ranks. In the past Disraeli had often advocated reciprocity and attacked dogmatic free traders, who failed to see that other nations might not apply their doctrines. Now that avenue was closed: 'they who talk of negotiating treaties of reciprocity - have they the materials for negotiating treaties of reciprocity? You have lost the opportunity ... the policy which was long ago abandoned you cannot resume,' he said in the House of Lords in the spring of 1879.2 For the moment protectionism, reciprocity and fair trade were only embarrassments for the Conservative party and had to be carefully quarantined. To have raised the cry of dear bread would have been politically fatal. Disraeli was worried by the threat to the rural bastion of Conservatism, so much so that he ventured out, much against his inclination, to make a speech in September at Aylesbury to the Royal Bucks Agricultural Association. It was one of only two public speeches he made in the autumn of Gladstone's first Midlothian campaign. He recommended rent reductions, the use of his own government's Agricultural Holdings Act on compensation for unexhausted improvements, and patient waiting for an upturn. He warned against 'cockney agitators', a reference to the Farmers'

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Alliance, which was articulating tenant farmer demands.3 It was driving a wedge between landlord and tenant and was causing alarm at Conservative Central Office. The appointment of a royal commission on agriculture shows how much he and his colleagues were baffled. After the defeat of 1880 he wrote to Lytton, the Indian viceroy he had himself appointed, the son of his old sparring partner Bulwer Lytton: Whatever philosophers may say, there is such a thing as luck & fortune - & the reverse - & that it should have fallen to my lot to govern England for a series of years with a decaying commerce & the soil stricken with sterility presents an issue which, I believe, no calculation could have foreseen or baffled.4 He could have claimed that the situation vindicated the views of his Young England days, but they were no longer practicable and he could meet bad trade and agricultural ruin only with fatalism. The only concrete step to emerge was the proposal for a 'national subscription' to alleviate distress, to be led by members of the royal family and of the government. In early capitalist economies it was an antidote to the threat of starvation and riot often resorted to at moments of severe slump. There was a good deal of support among Disraeli's colleagues for the idea and he was not himself averse to it. Northcote, the nearest thing to a minister responsible for the economy, warned against the idea: 'beware of another coup manqué ... I don't quite understand how we are to act as a government ... we do not have any [grounds] for moving.... We have bad trade, our workmen themselves aggravate the misfortune by their disputes with the employers ... think of the danger of having a relief committee sitting en permanence....' 5 Disraeli used a lot of the same language in a letter to Selina: 'You are right in supposing that the business which now takes up so much of my time is the general distress; but it is one most difficult to deal with. There are so many plans, so many schemes, and so many reasons why there should be neither plans nor schemes. What I fear is the Opposition, who will stick at nothing, may take up the theme for party purposes ... the property of the nation to support the numbers of unemployed labor? Worse than Socialism ... after all starvation has no answer....' 6 In the event there was not even the gesture of a national subscription.

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The government's economic problems were compounded, even overshadowed, by difficulties abroad that quickly took the shine off Disraeli's triumph in Berlin. At one critical point during the Near Eastern crisis, in December 1877, he had claimed in cabinet that he 'had never tried to impose his opns on his colleagues, but to conduct affairs with them on the principle of liberty, equality, & fraternity'.7 This way of doing business had its downside and this became very evident in the two foreign imbroglios, South Africa and Afghanistan, that now damaged his reputation. In spite of his public image as the champion of imperialism he had in fact no consistent imperial and colonial policy and certainly no general policy of expansion. For most of the time Carnarvon, Twitters, was the minister responsible for colonial policy. A High Churchman, who had resigned from the cabinet in 1867, he was a difficult colleague and Disraeli went out of his way to humour him. When in 1874 as colonial secretary he annexed the Fiji Islands, not because of some general policy of expansion, but for complex local reasons. Disraeli told him: 'I must leave the matter entirely to your discretion. There is none of my colleagues in whom I have more confidence than yourself, and I always say your administration of your office is most able.'8 The policy of federation which Carnarvon had successfully applied in Canada proved unsuitable for South Africa, but Disraeli simply let it run. When Carnarvon's South African policy had landed him in serious trouble Disraeli became very bitter. In September 1878, by which time Carnarvon was criticizing the government from the outside, he wrote to Selina: 'if anything annoys me more than another it is our Cape affairs, when every day brings forward a new blunder of Twitters'.9 He was even more uncomplimentary about Froude, the historian, whom Carnarvon had sent on a mission to South Africa: 'Mr Froude - a desultory and theoretical litterateur who wrote more rot on the reign of Elizabeth than Gibbon required for all the Decline and Fall .. .'.10 The fact was that Disraeli took very little interest in the details of colonial and imperial policy and was above all concerned to avoid trouble. Expenditure spelt trouble and therefore any active expansionism was precluded. The case of Afghanistan was different, and here Disraeli's personal involvement was greater. The position of Afghanistan as a buffer state between India and Russian imperial expansion in Central Asia meant that it was directly connected with the great power rivalries which also figured in the Near Eastern crisis.

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Disraeli had no hand in the appointment of Sir Bartle Frere as governor of the Cape Colony and high commissioner in South Africa, but had to defend him in public. Lytton, the viceroy in India, the other 'prancing pro-consul', was his appointment, not his first choice, but, as he said, 'We wanted a man of ambition, imagination, some vanity and much will - and we have got him.'11 Years later an Indian newspaper called Lytton 'a secondrate poet employed to work out the visionary plans of a secondrate novelist in India'.12 Disraeli approved of the way Lytton exploited the queen's imperial title and was in favour of the policy of securing a 'scientific frontier' for India. As long as the 'forward' policy in Afghanistan went well he had no objection. Disaster first struck in South Africa, the defeat and destruction at Isandhlwana of Lord Chelmsford's force of 1200 men in January 1879. 'The terrible disaster has shaken me to the centre and what increases the grief is that I have not only to endure it, but to sustain others and to keep a bold front before an unscrupulous enemy,' he wrote to Lady Chesterfield.13 In June the Prince Imperial, the heir of Napoleon III, who had been sent out at his and his mother's wish with reinforcements for Chelmsford, was killed by the Zulus in an ambush. The government's prestige was badly dented and Disraeli complained that the need for 20,000 more troops had weakened his European policy. He was angry about Chelmsford, whose father he had forced to resign as Lord Chancellor in 1868. His treatment of Chelmsford and of Frere, who, he privately said, should be impeached, caused his most severe difference of opinion with the queen. She objected to the sending out, with plenary powers, of Sir Garnet Wolseley. As one of the colonels behind Cardwell's army reforms he had earned the undying hostility of the Duke of Cambridge, the commander-in-chief and cousin of the queen. Wolseley's mission caused Chelmsford, but not Frere, to resign. Pressure from the queen could not induce Disraeli to receive Chelmsford at Hughenden on his return, but only in Downing Street. Then, on 3 September, disaster also struck in Afghanistan, with the slaughter of the British mission under Sir Louis Cavagnari. Lytton, exceeding his orders from London, had forced this mission on the amir. Disraeli criticized him in private, but fully backed him in his Guildhall speech in November 1879. Disraeli felt that situations had been allowed to arise in South Africa and Afghanistan which he had not intended and which could not be fully controlled from London. His style of

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government was to set general orientations and let his subordinates get on with it. It was by now firmly perceived by friend and foe that his orientation was 'imperialist' and 'forward' and his oratory had done everything to encourage such a view. In the 1879 Guildhall speech he had said: I speak on this subject with confidence to the citizens of London, because I know they are the men who are not ashamed of the Empire which their ancestors created; because I know they are not ashamed of the noblest of human sentiments, now decried by Philosophers - the sentiment of patriotism; because I know they will not be beguiled into believing that in maintaining their Empire they may forfeit their liberties. One of the greatest of Romans, when asked what were his politics, replied, Imperium et Libertas. That would not make a bad programme for a British Ministry.14 Gladstone would not allow such a pronouncement to go unchallenged. He was about to embark on the Midlothian campaign. In 1874 he had come second to a brewer at Greenwich and had toyed with the idea of finding a new constituency, finally settling, at the beginning of 1879, on Midlothian, the area around Edinburgh. He was now fully back in politics and there was a likelihood, though no certainty, that a Liberal electoral victory would return him to the lead of his party. Whatever the difficulties in the Tory party, about the balance between the urban middle classes and the continued pre-eminence of the landed interest, they were eclipsed by the tensions in the Liberal party between Whigs and Radicals. The return of Gladstone would shift the balance towards Radicalism - this was the Tory view, at any rate. This assessment somewhat mitigated the alarm felt in the Tory ranks about the 'drenching rhetoric' that emanated from Midlothian. Gladstone was engaged in a piece of image-making that looks in retrospect like a significant step towards modern politicking. It was a powerful combination of a moral with a material appeal which has come to be thought essential to effective political mass appeal. The moral appeal consisted in the enunciation of the classical doctrine of liberal internationalism, the material in showing that an immoral policy had also produced excessive expenditure and disturbance of trade. The sound and sober principles of Peelite-Gladstonian finance had been abandoned. The litany of complaint was

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wrapped up in the term 'Beaconsfieldism', thus personifying the evil that Gladstone was attacking. It was also a clever piece of media-manipulation, for all newspapers, whatever their political allegiance, carried a full account of the speeches. Thus there was full exposure to the Gladstonian oratory at Tory as well as Liberal breakfast tables.15 It could not but be a weakness that Disraeli did not answer in kind, but such a performance before a mass audience had never been to his liking. He no longer had the physical energy for platform oratory and even the annual speech at the Lord Mayor's dinner exhausted him utterly. Gladstone saw himself as the man who could unite Whigs and Radicals in a moral crusade. Neither Hartington, the Whig who was the formal leader of the party, nor Joseph Chamberlain, who regarded himself as the most potent future leader of a radicalized Liberal party, saw it quite that way. To them Gladstone's moralizing approach to the realities of international power appeared misconceived. Without Gladstone Chamberlain and Hartington might have collaborated quite happily, at least for the moment. More than even during the Bulgarian agitation, Gladstone seemed to arouse mass passions which to the Whig leaders and to many of the Liberal intellectual elite appeared dangerous. The crowds which greeted him with fervour and torchlight processions mostly could not hear, let alone understand the gospel of international morality he was preaching, and were perhaps looking for a messiah to lead them to a promised land of revolutionary transformation. Gladstone had returned to his evangelical roots to become a prophet. He accused Disraeli of caesarism, yet forty years later Max Weber, the German sociologist, pinpointed the Midlothian campaign as the beginning of the 'caesarist-plebiscitarian element in politics, the appearance of the dictator of the electoral battlefield'.16 The first Midlothian campaign was followed by a second, in March 1880, when the dissolution of parliament had been announced. After the end of the sixth session of the 1874 parliament, in the summer of 1879, a dissolution could no longer be attacked as premature. The Zulu war was looking slightly better, there were reports that trade was improving, wishful thinking as it turned out, and the disaster at Kabul was still to come. There was deeper involvement in Egypt, with the ousting of the bankrupt Khedive and the establishment of an Anglo-French regime of financial control. It could be represented as another example of Disraelian expansionism and of acting in the

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interests of Egyptian bond-holders, as the Turkish policy was often portrayed as a Turkish bond-holders' policy. Disraeli was in fact always notably cautious about getting too deep into Egypt and out of step with France in the process. Salisbury was now in charge of Egyptian affairs. Ironically it was to be Gladstone, a considerable portion of whose private fortune was in Egyptian bonds, who got sucked right in. As for the timing of the dissolution, there was a feeling that if the government met parliament for a seventh session, somewhat unusual in any case, the cost in taxation of its ventures abroad would become painfully obvious. Northcote had already raised income tax by a penny in 1877 and by fivepence in 1878. The prime minister refused to sanction anything so unpopular with the labouring classes as an increase in the duty on tea and an issue of Exchequer bonds was agreed at a fractious cabinet in July 1879. Northcote told his chief that 'the views expressed at the Cabinet today' were 'extremely unsatisfactory' to him and that he felt his 'position severely shaken'.17 He was now in favour of meeting parliament for another session, to defend his financial probity. As the time for a dissolution came nearer Corry kept his master in touch with the party managers. Disraeli's low expectations when the election actually came indicate that he, like Corry, took their mildly optimistic, anodyne prognostications with a pinch of salt. It soon became an article of faith that weaknesses in party organization were a major factor in the defeat of 1880 and the later political campaign of Lord Randolph Churchill and Gorst made much of that explanation. The party managers certainly proved incapable of providing an analysis that might have given a warning of the disaster to come. Three by-elections in early 1880 provided clues, but they could not be accurately read. First there was Sheffield, caused by the death of the veteran 'patriotic Radical' Roebuck. In a poll of nearly thirty thousand the Conservative came within 1500 votes of winning, thought to be a very creditable performance. Then there was Liverpool, where a Tory, the popular Whitley, won by fewer than 1500 votes in a poll of 50,000, 80 per cent of the electorate. The Liberal candidate, Lord Ramsay, heir to the Earl of Dalhousie, was a Whig, who was induced at a late stage to make a gesture towards the Irish home-rulers. Up to a quarter of the Liverpool electorate was Catholic, most of them Irish, but a lot of the Liberal voters had little sympathy for Home Rule.18 More national significance

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was read into this result than the complex and exceptional local circumstances warranted. Then there was Southwark, to all appearances a real Tory triumph. The queen and Disraeli were both delighted. The prime minister brought his fist down on to the cabinet table, in an uncharacteristic gesture of triumph. There were two rival Liberal candidates, which seemed to show that the caucus system was so divisive that it was creating more difficulties than advantages for the Liberal party. The able Tory candidate, Edward Clarke, a man with a considerable political future, had a small majority of 54 votes over both Liberal candidates. The Southwark victory convinced the cabinet that they had nothing to lose from an early dissolution. By this time there were a number of other reasons why they were reluctant to face a full session. Northcote had had to go public with his raid on the sinking fund and had been unconvincing in his defence of a move that went so much against prevailing notions of financial probity. A measure to buy out the metropolitan water companies, proposed by Cross, was criticized for setting too high a value on the existing private companies. This gave rise, when the dissolution was announced, to the joke that the Tories came in on beer and went out on water. The announcement of the dissolution still came as a surprise, for ministers having once embarked on a seventh session of parliament were expected to go on with it. Disraeli's election manifesto, the only direct appeal to the voters open to him as a peer, also caused surprise. It took the form of an open letter to the Duke of Marlborough as viceroy of Ireland and concentrated almost entirely on the danger of Irish separatism: 'And yet there are some who challenge the imperial character of this realm. Having attempted, and failed, to enfeeble our colonies by their policy of decomposition, they may perhaps now recognize in the disintegration of the United Kingdom a mode which will not only accomplish but precipitate their purpose.'19 Disraeli's policy towards Ireland since 1874 had been one of letting sleeping dogs lie. Only within the last year or so had the government been forced to pay more attention to Irish affairs, though the obstruction of Parnell, Biggar and others at Westminster had been an irritant at least since 1877. Disraeli was using the threat from the home-rulers to focus on what he saw as his strongest claim to re-election, that he had raised the power and prestige of the country, when Gladstone's policy before 1874 had lowered it and his activities since 1876 were threatening to

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undermine it even further. Disraeli may well have sensed that Home Rule was unpopular with the voters and the recent Liverpool by-election seemed to bear this out. The manifesto made no mention of the social reform measures enacted in the early years of his government, but a claim to have furthered the well-being of the people might have sounded hollow in a period of economic slump. In any case such a manifesto could only be effective if it had become the centrepiece of a sustained party campaign. Here the Tories were definitely outclassed. Not only could Disraeli himself not appear, other major stars like Salisbury, Cairns and Cranbrook were also debarred as peers. Nevertheless the personality of Disraeli was an important factor. The Liberal Spectator put it thus: 'It is for the country to choose ... between the old statesmen who, by the continuous improvements of half-a-century, have made England what it is ... and the flashy Oriental who offers it notoriety, and who has in every quarter of the world destroyed its reputation for fair dealing, unselfishness and respect for the rights of the weak.'20 The defeat of 1880 more than wiped out all the gains of 1874 and on the face of it appeared to set at nought Disraeli's life work. The Conservative majority of about 100 over the Liberals in 1874 was almost exactly reversed. The erosion of what had always been regarded as the Tory party's central bulwark, the English rural vote, was particularly striking: 29 English county seats were lost. In small boroughs with a population of under 10,000 the Conservatives could now only draw level with the Liberals, 27 seats each, whereas in 1874 they had been divided 34 to 20 in their favour. In boroughs with a population between 10,000 and 20,000 the Liberals now had a greater advantage in seats than in 1868 and in the bigger towns the position was almost back to 1868. In Scotland 13 out of 60 seats were lost, leaving the Tories with only six. In Wales the great repudiation of Anglicanism and Toryism had already occurred in 1868, but 9 out of the remaining 11 Tory seats were now lost. In Ireland 1880 saw the emergence of a tightly disciplined Parnellite party. The conclusion seemed obvious that the Tory victory of 1874 had been only a hiccup in a permanent Liberal ascendancy which was likely to be reinforced in the near future by the extension of household suffrage to the counties. In fact the outlook was not quite as sombre. The county and small borough results showed, as both Disraeli and Salisbury realized, that the Conservative party need no longer fear a redistribution of seats contingent on

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the extension of the county franchise. In the big towns the Conservative vote held up much better than the result in terms of seats indicated. Some conspicuous successes, such as that of Lord George Hamilton and his partner in holding Middlesex with a 2:1 majority against the Liberals, were heartening. In the major urban centres the Tories were not driven back to their 1868 position. Partly this was due to 'villa Toryism', the move of the middle classes in suburban areas to the Tories, but some of it must be attributed to the existence, in substantial numbers, of Tory working men. When the Liberals eventually turned to equalizing the county and borough franchises, Salisbury threw his weight behind 'equal electoral districts' and forced the Liberals to show their hand on redistribution simultaneously with franchise extension. Overall a closer correlation between seats and size of population came about and helped the Tories. Disraeli was still not ready to retire. He took the defeat with equanimity, even good humour. The queen asked him for advice about his successor and he confirmed her in her intention to call on Hartington in the first instance. If both of them hoped thereby to keep Gladstone from the premiership, their hopes were disappointed. A Hartington ministry was, however, not just a Disraeli fancy or an attempt to sow dissension in the Liberal ranks. Many Liberals and even some Radicals would have preferred the solid Whig to the zealot of Midlothian. Perhaps it would have been a difficult moment for Disraeli to retire, for the question who should succeed him was still wide open. Officially Northcote had to be regarded as the obvious choice, but Disraeli's own preference was undoubtedly Salisbury. Disraeli's continued leadership was endorsed with a show of enthusiasm, probably genuine enough, at a party meeting of some 500 peers and MPs on 19 May at Bridgewater House. Disraeli attributed the defeat mainly to the 'general social distress', which resulted from 'natural causes' but was blamed on the late government by 'travelling agitators'. He picked out as another reason for the defeat 'the "new foreign political organisation" of the Liberal party' and announced that a small committee under W.H. Smith was examining this problem. He gave hope for the future: Gladstone might stumble as quickly as Grey had done after the election of 1832, when the Tories had been even more severely mauled. He foresaw 'the party of revolution, perhaps 100 in number' dividing the Liberals. The Tory party would have at first to support the government against the 'violent proposals' coming

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from their own side. The Conservative party's policy must be 'to maintain the Empire and preserve the Constitution'. The empire depended on the tie with the colonies and he mentioned with pride the 10,000 troops Canada had offered at the height of the Balkan crisis. It was a far cry from the irritation at the cost of North American defence that made him write of 'millstones'. As for the constitution, a revolution in the tenure of land must be resisted, 'the pulling down of the aristocracy' by 'the revolutionary party'. As for himself, 'in the hour of failure he would not withdraw' and would still give them the benefit of his experience.21 Disraeli's political role in the eleven months of life left to him was a somewhat distant one. He spent most of the time at Hughenden, for he no longer had a London house. Alfred de Rothschild, Lionel's second son, put at his disposal 'a suite of independent rooms' in his house in Seamore Place, but in January he acquired a London residence again in Curzon Street. He was not therefore expecting an early end and his health was better in the summer than it had been for a while. His correspondence with the Ladies Bradford and Chesterfield continued. He went on writing to the queen and stayed three times at Windsor. Constitutionally this no longer mattered much, since no one could have been more partisan than she now was, and most of the correspondence consisted of social gossip. In his resignation honours he had induced her to make his secretary Monty Corry Lord Rowton. It was a typically Disraelian operation, for he had first to ensure that Monty's expectations of inheriting a Shropshire estate from a widowed aunt were confirmed in her will. Even then he had slightly to mislead the queen, by giving her to understand that Monty was about to inherit when the event was still an unpredictable number of years ahead. But from a human angle one can hardly quarrel with so generously intended and elegantly executed a manoeuvre. Even Monty did not share one of Disraeli's secrets, that he was working on another novel. He had started Endymion while in opposition before 1874 and he now finished it. It was another tale of high society, written with a light touch and enlivened by vignettes of the many notable personalities that had crossed the author's path. There was Count Ferroll, Bismarck, and a more favourable portrait of Manning, Nigel Penruddock, than Cardinal Grandison in Lothair. The Cardinal had returned to the Tory fold and had had a friendly meeting with Disraeli. Bismarck

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was often in Disraeli's thoughts. When Lord Ronald Gower visited him at Hughenden in November he said: 'Bismarck and I were perfectly d'accord. Had the late Government lasted we would have kept the democrats of Europe in check; but now all is over!'22 There were also figures from the author's past, for example Waldershare, George Smythe, and Lord Roehampton, Palmerston. Disraeli juggles with a wide range of ideas and social phenomena in his usual idiosyncratic manner and many seriousminded people found this distasteful. If he had been less famous and eminent the book would probably not have made much impact. He was given an advance of £10,000 by the publisher Longman, an unprecedented amount. Initially the sales did not come up to expectation and Disraeli offered to scrap the original agreement and to take just half the advance. Longman, to his credit, declined the offer and a cheaper edition soon recouped his outlay. After Endymion Disraeli started yet another novel, Falconet, of which he wrote about 12,000 words before he died. It is noteworthy for the portrait it draws of Gladstone, the Arch Villain, or A.V., as he now often called him in his private letters. Joseph Toplady Falconet is clearly Gladstone: 'a child of singular precocity. His power of acquisition was remarkable ... a grave boy, and scarcely ever known to smile; and this not so much from a want of sympathy for those among whom he was born ... but rather from a complete deficiency in the sense of humour, of which he seemed quite debarred ... his chief peculiarity was his disputatious temper, and the flow of language which, even as a child, was ever at command to express his argument'. Once an MP he gathered around him 'a great, though latent fund of Religionism. ... He gathered other allies. With all his abilities and acquirements, Joseph Toplady Falconet was essentially a prig, and among prigs there is a freemasonry which never fails. All the prigs spoke of him as the coming man.'23 The key political issues of the day still commanded Disraeli's attention and intervention. Ireland began to dominate proceedings and blew the government seriously off course. With the full support of Salisbury, he ruthlesslessly exploited Gladstone's predicament by killing the Compensation for Disturbance Bill, the government's major effort in the first session of the new parliament to mitigate the tensions in the Irish countryside by halting evictions without compensation. To landowners in England as well as Ireland it looked like an assault on property.

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Opposition to it attracted Whig support in both Houses and in the Lords the bill was defeated by 282 to 51 votes. On other issues Disraeli led his party to display the caution he had advised at the Bridgewater House meeting. Chamberlain, the main representative of the Radicals in the cabinet, promoted an Employers' Liability Bill, providing compensation for industrial accidents, which was allowed to pass. Disraeli wanted to do nothing to offend labour, even if the increasing employer interest on the Tory benches did not like it. Then there was a Ground Game Bill, also known as Hares and Rabbits Bill, which gave tenant farmers the right to shoot game destructive to crops on their land. Landlords, Whig as well as Tory, disliked it intensely. It divided the landed interest yet again, something that had already done so much damage in the election and Disraeli called it 'much the most devilish of the A.V.'s schemes'.24 He managed to get the Tory peers, most of whom were away shooting, to hold their fire. In this last phase of his life Disraeli was torn between gloom and hope. The gloom surfaces in his letters to the two sisters: 'It is a revolutionary age and the chances are, that even you and I may live to see the final extinction of the great London Season, which was the wonder and admiration of our youth,' he wrote to Lady Chesterfield on 27 June.25 But then again he hoped that his prediction of an early disruption of the Liberal majority was about to happen. 'Affairs are critical: some expect a disruption before the meeting of parliament,' he wrote to Cairns in December 1880.26 He was in fact advising caution in meeting Gladstone's Irish Land Bill enshrining the 'Three Fs', the centrepiece of the 1881 session. The Tory party was itself divided over policy, tactics and personalities. The most conspicuous manifestation of these divisions was the emergence of the Fourth Party, the name jocularly given to the four freelancing members: Arthur Balfour, Sir Henry Drummond-Wolff, John Gorst and Lord Randolph Churchill. At this stage Churchill was often advised by Gorst, who had briefly returned to the party organization after the fiasco of the general election. Gorst was still thirsting for the personal advancement which his earlier work in the party organization had failed to give him. He and Churchill would in due course mobilize the discontent of the new middle-class activists in the party against the aristocratic party managers. The Fourth Party had Northcote's cautious leadership in their sights and suspected him of angling for a formal alliance with the Whigs. Disraeli naturally saw in the Fourth Party a kind

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of reincarnation of Young England, sympathized with all-out opposition and gave mild encouragement, but also enjoined loyalty to Northcote. On 25 August Arthur Balfour accompanied him to the House of Commons Gallery to see his Fourth Party comrades and 'other new lights' like Chamberlain in action. When in the autumn Disraeli was again attacked by his old enemies, gout and asthma, he was thinking of the succession and Salisbury was his natural choice. The Fourth Party went all out for Salisbury, and against Northcote, and after Disraeli's death, invoked his name for their campaign. In spite of the many years of ill health Disraeli had suffered death in the end came rather unexpectedly. At the beginning of the 1881 parliamentary session he still took his full share in the difficult decisions the party had to take to deal with the Irish obstruction, which led to the famous 41-hour sitting and eventually to the adoption of the closure. The government had to be supported in upholding the ability of the House of Commons to function and in the maintenance of law and order in Ireland, but Disraeli was not prepared to go as far as Northcote in giving the Liberal government a blank cheque. To the queen he was full of praise for Northcote's conduct in difficult circumstances. There was so much unfinished business in the Tory party, not least in respect of the future leadership, that had Disraeli lived, his role as ultimate arbiter would have continued. In March he was still attending dinner parties and he spoke for the last time in the Lords on 15 March on the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. By early April another attack of his old enemies was causing anxiety and he died on 19 April. Gladstone offered a public funeral but Disraeli's will expressed a wish for a private funeral at Hughenden and burial in the vault next to his wife. Gladstone's private comment was 'as he lived so he died - all display without genuineness' and his public reaction cost him, valiant for truth as he was, much effort.27 The queen, also valiant for truth, was debarred by protocol from attending the funeral and sent two wreaths of primroses. She later visited Hughenden and the vault in the churchyard was opened for her to lay a china wreath of flowers.

11 Afterlife: the rise of the Disraeli myth

When Disraeli died in April 1881 he had already acquired the status of an icon in the Tory party. The defeat of the party a year earlier had hardly diminished his stature in the eyes of his followers. The fury with which he was attacked by his opponents and the existence of a counter-icon in the person of Gladstone only served to raise his status. It helped that he was at least as great as an image- and myth-maker as he was as a practising statesman, and that these images and myths could be put to wide and even contradictory uses. The weak situation in which he left his party made it all the more tempting for those who sought his succession to pick over the entrails of his legacy and to extract what suited their agenda. The most obvious legacy was the imperial patriotism he had articulated and which had given him his greatest success as a statesman. It was a powerful message, for circumstances kept it relevant for a long time to come. 'The Expansion of England', the title of the lectures J.R. Seeley delivered two years after Disraeli's death, developed a theme that could without difficulty be linked to what Disraeli had done, and even more to what he had said when he was in power. The fact that so much Disraelian policy was improvised and cautious in practice did not invalidate the rhetoric. He had set out to raise the profile of Britain as a power, at a time when other powers, the United States, Germany, Russia, were appearing as rivals. In this competition Britain could only stay in the race as an empire, not as a small island with an economy in relative decline. Even those who had, like Gladstone, proclaimed a counter-gospel of cosmopolitanism, as Disraeli had called it, or of pacific internationalism, as it might be more justly labelled, found themselves

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sucked into the imperial maelstrom. Egypt was the prime example of Gladstone having to do in practice what he had attacked in theory. Gladstone always remained a reluctant imperialist, but soon there were Liberal imperialists who were anything but reluctant. Then there was Ireland, so much in the forefront of the political scene immediately after Disraeli's departure. Appeasement of Irish nationalism was part of that Liberal 'disintegration' that Disraeli had long castigated and that he had, to the surprise of many, made the theme of his election manifesto in 1880. It mattered little that in practice he had no Irish policy when in power and that he had thereby arguably allowed matters to drift to the point where Parnell posed a real challenge to the unity of the kingdom. The Liberal camp itself was divided over Ireland and Liberal unionism tore it apart. The long Tory ascendancy after 1886 owed a great deal to that split and it could not be attributed to Disraeli, but it could only help his posthumous reputation. Joseph Chamberlain regarded himself as one of several front-rank politicians who had inherited Disraeli's mantle. When after the defeat of 1906 he finally nailed tariff reform on to the Tory banner it was called 'the greatest political triumph since ... Disraeli captured the Conservative Party'.1 Many commentators have seen in Joseph Chamberlain the classic case of social imperialism, but already Disraeli was widely seen as a social imperialist, even if in his day the term had not yet come into use. If social imperialism means transcending class tensions by imperial patriotism and alleviating them by social reform, then Disraeli was the precursor of later, more explicit social imperialists in the Conservative party. Authoritarian, even proto-fascist motives have been discerned in Chamberlain's tariff reform campaign. Very similar motives were imputed to Disraeli's 'forward' foreign and imperial policies by his opponents and the Indian imperial title was seen as the start of a constitutional revolution to overturn the Liberal state in Britain. Bruno Bauer, a German publicist of some fame, published in 1882 a book entitled Disraeli's Romantic and Bismarck's Socialist Imperialism.2 He called them both 'revolutionary taskmasters of Europe'. In Disraeli's case he concedes that 'he contented himself with putting the seal of the English state on foreign revolutions', but claims that 'his innermost interest was the dictatorship in England herself, the disintegration and bursting apart of party groups'. It was exactly this accusation that his

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domestic opponents levied against him. Through the images he himself provided Disraeli's aims could be made to look gigantic, alluring to some, menacing to others. Tory Democracy was a term Disraeli never used, but his posthumous impact is closely linked with it. Lord Randolph Churchill introduced it as a weapon in his struggle to become a leader of the party. This intra-party turmoil can at least be partly laid at the door of Disraeli himself, who left so much unresolved in the final years of his ascendancy. Not only was the succession to the leadership in confusion, the social basis of the party was in a process of transition. It was still the aristocratic party dedicated to the preservation of the territorial constitution, but the middle classes, the 'enjoying classes', were turning to it. The reform bill passed by Derby and Disraeli in 1867 had ensured that growing attention had to be paid to the 'labouring classes'. Disraeli himself was most at ease with the aristocratic section of his party, indeed his whole life can be seen as a process of rooting himself in it. His lack of rapport with much of the ethos of middle-class England persisted, but he had reined in his prejudices against it. But when he died the middle classes had not yet been allotted a major place in the party, while the agricultural depression was about to diminish permanently the role of the landed aristocracy. As the Fourth Party emerged in the summer of 1880 Disraeli had given contradictory signals. Lord Randolph Churchill was the kind of scion of the high aristocracy to whom he was always drawn, but he had given him trouble by his quarrel with the Prince of Wales. Gorst's reproaches about having been neglected also annoyed him and he was unsure of the man's real motives. Gorst's complaints always included attacks on the aristocratic party managers, men like Abergavenny, the 'Old Identity' as he came to call them, and this can hardly have appealed to Disraeli. But in the remaining months of his life Churchill and company appeared mainly as parliamentary gadflies. With such tactics he could sympathize, provided Northcote was not too brutally baited. It was only after Disraeli's death that the Fourth Party campaign began to broaden out. Churchill was making a mark as a popular orator, filling the void which Disraeli and his colleagues had been unable to fill. He and his comrades were soon in full cry, using the Beaconsfield legacy and Tory Democracy as principal themes. Gorst was telling Churchill that the time was ripe for a 'Democratic Tory party, which was always Dizzy's dream, at the

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head of which you might easily place yourself'.3 The Fortnightly Review of October and November 1882 carried anonymous articles about 'The State of the Opposition', of which Gorst, Churchill and Wolff were rumoured to be the authors. The nub of the argument was that the party must be rid of the blue-blooded nonentities and bourgeois placemen who had clustered round the chief in his old age. Disraeli, on the other hand, had discerned the potentialities of a popular party in the Lancashire election results of 1868 and had built his success in 1874 on these foundations. Disraeli's legacy, 'Elijah's Mantle', was looking for an heir. Churchill used this image again in the title of another Fortnightly article in May 1883 'Elijah's Mantle, 19th April 1883': The expression "Tory Democracy" has excited the wonder of some, the alarm of others and bitter ridicule from the Radical Party. But the "Tory Democracy" may yet exist; the elements for its composition only require to be effected by the man, wherever he may be, upon whom the mantle of Elijah has descended.'4 The reader was left to infer that the man might be Lord Randolph himself. A month earlier he had written a letter to The Times, taking issue with the choice of Northcote to unveil the Beaconsfield statue at Westminster on the second anniversary of the great man's death. Churchill might for the moment be content to share Disraeli's mantle with Salisbury, but not with Northcote. Dead or alive the political battle continued to swirl round Disraeli. The following year saw the foundation of the Primrose League, an attempt to establish that popular base for the party which Churchill and others were demanding. By the 1890s it was the largest political organization in the country, providing, amongst other things, a chance to play a political role for the disfranchised female half of the population. It was named after what was in the view of Mrs Brydges Willyams and of the queen his favourite flower, though another close friend, Lady Dorothy Nevill, cannot remember a preference on his part for it. As so often with Disraeli, myth was more potent than reality. The unresolved condition in which he had left the party, between Northcote and Salisbury, between aristocracy, middle and working class, was itself instrumental in keeping his myth politically active. As ever the loathing of opponents played its part. In 1885 Gladstone wrote to his friend Lord Acton: 'Tory democracy', the favourite idea on that side, is no more like the conservative party in which I was bred, than

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it is like liberalism. In fact less. It is demagogism, only a demagogism not ennobled by love and appreciation of liberty, but applied in the worst way, to put down the pacific, law-respecting economic elements which ennobled the old Conservatism, living upon the fomentation of angry passions, and still in secret as obstinately attached as ever to the evil principle of class interests.5 Gladstone might well have written 'Beaconsfieldism' instead of 'Tory Democracy'. On the morrow of his great victory in 1880 he had written to Argyll: 'The downfall of Beaconsfieldism is like the vanishing of some magnificent castle in an Italian romance', and would bring joy 'to the large majority of the civilised world'.6 The political battles of the years immediately after Disraeli's death thus ensured that his name was never absent from current controversies. Historians and political writers also played their part in keeping his memory alive. The Tory journalist T.E. Kebbel republished in 1886, under the title A History of Toryism, a series of articles he had written for the National Review. Disraeli figures alongside Pitt and Peel as one of the three great Tory ministers who 'have formed schools of statesmanship'. Kebbel was an exponent of the view that Disraeli had small sympathy with the middle classes who 'worshipped the name of Sir Robert Peel; and while they retained their predominance he struggled vainly to gain a firm hold on power'. On the other hand, in Kebbel's opinion, Disraeli had 'early identified himself with the interests and sympathies of the poor', so that when their enfranchisement became inevitable 'his measure of 1867, and all subsequent legislation in their favour, seemed but the natural development of views which he had previously enunciated'.7 There was a spate of Disraeli biographies at home and abroad. An early biographer to enter the lists, in 1890, was the distinguished historian J.A. Froude.8 He was a Tory Radical in the mould of Carlyle, whose biographer he was, as well as an imperialist. Although attracted by some of Disraeli's ideas, he was, like Carlyle, intensely suspicious of Disraeli, the Hebrew conjurer. Unlike Disraeli, Froude was from his background burdened with the weight of Victorian religion and morality and struggled all his life to come to terms with it. He therefore emphasized, like more recent Disraeli students, the Jewish and alien side of his subject and the way it left him free of ties and commitments. The stereotyping of Disraeli as

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'the alien patriot' had begun. Gladstone himself, reading in 1880 a biography by the Danish-Jewish historian Georg Brandes, was struck by the 'description of Beaconsfield's mind as metallic & mine as fluid'.9 This biography, written while the 1874 ministry was still in progress, devotes most of its space to Disraeli's literary output, for Brandes had little to go on in dealing with Disraeli the politician. The Danish writer was perceptive about the nature and the provenance of Disraeli's make-up: One cannot comprehend anything of Disraeli's character if one overlooks that his theories and ideals, which with him most fully bear the mark of the great romantic reaction, were from the start disinfected by inborn scepticism and an early developed criticism. ... Not only the critical and negative, but also the positive, romantic-conservative tendencies of Benjamin Disraeli derive from his father. The old literary man had, in spite of being in religion radical, an instinctive leaning towards Tory thinking.10 Foreigners could read Disraeli's novels as well as natives, but it was political events at home that kept the Disraeli myth going. The question which seemed most insistently to require an answer was how to keep a Conservative party going in face of advancing mass democracy. The Disraelian legacy appeared to supply the answer to the problem he had himself posed with his Two Nations image. The great Tory debacle of 1906 made the question doubly relevant. A further milestone in the propagation of the myth was the publication in 1906 of Winston Churchill's biography of his father Randolph.11 This made much of the fact that Lord Randolph had seen himself as the true heir of Disraeli's popular Toryism, while his opponents had betrayed the Disraeli heritage. Hence his son Winston, the reader was left to infer, had to abandon the Conservative party which had fallen into the wrong hands. Winston was thus justifying his own recent conversion from Tory to Liberal in writing about his father, but his volumes were much more readable than other double-decker monuments to Victorian politicians. The publication of Disraeli's own biographical monument began in 1910. The first two volumes were by W.F. Monypenny, a Times journalist who died in 1912 shortly before the second volume appeared. The remaining four volumes were written by George Buckle, who had recently resigned as editor of The Times after a disagreement with Lord Northcliffe, and their publication was completed by

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1920. Monypenny and Buckle eulogize and justify Disraeli unreservedly and only occasionally allow themselves a critical note. The work does, however, reproduce the surviving documentation of Disraeli's life more fully than other similar biographies, or at least that part of it that did not offend contemporary notions of respectability. Much of the documentation that would have offended such susceptibilities had in any case not survived the weeding undertaken by Disraeli's executors, Monty Corry, Lord Rowton, and Lionel de Rothschild. The sources used by Monypenny and Buckle were those immediately pertaining to Disraeli. They did not have at their disposal the great volume of public and private contextual documentation and the many diaries that have since become available. Particularly in the final volumes George Buckle was concerned to vindicate Disraeli's foreign and imperial policies and he dealt more fully with that topic than originally intended. The battle between Tory imperialists and Liberal Little Englanders was still being fought. The perspective taken by Buckle appears now outmoded and many of the questions that are now of interest were not then asked. After the Second World War many political and sexual taboos no longer operated and all aspects of the Victorian age were open to analysis. The Young Disraeli, published by B.R. Jerman in 1960, opened the door on Disraeli's chequered early life.12 The defining postwar biography, doing full justice both to the public and private life of its subject, was published by Robert Blake in 1966 and has not been superseded in any major aspect. Almost simultaneously a book on Disraelian social reform by Paul Smith exposed the idea that there was a distinct form of Conservative social reform as largely a myth.13 The Conservative social reform legislation of the 1860s and 1870s could equally well have been passed by Liberal governments, was not the result of an ideology originally proclaimed in the trilogy of novels and owed little to the initiative of the prime minister. Against this Peter Ghosh has more recently argued that the intention behind Disraeli's promotion of Conservative reform was to put forward an alternative to the reform of the political framework which Liberals and Radicals were proposing. Tory reform was proclaimed to be more immediately relevant to the needs of the people, and less disturbing to social cohesion, than the constitutional reforms, based on democratic dogma, advocated from the Left.14 Ghosh also pointed out that Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer had a financial

Afterlife: the rise of the Disraeli myth

217

policy that was not unlike that of Gladstone, in some respects more original, but he did not have the opportunities to put it into practice.15 On foreign and imperial affairs C.C. Eldridge and others have shown that Disraeli's policy was one of consolidation rather than expansion.16 What seemed to emerge from the reexamination of Disraeli's domestic and foreign political role was a certain lack of substance behind the Disraeli myth. The question was asked why he should have become an icon, when Salisbury was so much more successful as a practising statesman and more considerable as a conservative thinker. Peel rather than Disraeli should be seen as the father of the modern Conservative party, but it was also argued that Disraeli's part in Peel's destruction had been overestimated. Peel was mainly responsible for his own downfall and had failed, in the 1840s, to construct the middleclass-based liberal-conservative party that arose later. The time was not ripe for it and Peel was tactically inept. The modern liberal-conservative party, however, owed little to Disraeli. His career could therefore be regarded as a failure rather than as a fairy tale, his world of ideas meretricious and disconnected from his meagre achievements. It was, however, not really possible to write Disraeli out of the script of Victorian history. As the spirit of the times became more postmodern, the ability to influence events through images looked as significant as the exercise of power. In giving his party, through a few well-chosen phrases, the image of imperial patriotism and social concern Disraeli had exercised more lasting influence than the makers of social and legislative arrangements that were soon overtaken by events and forgotten. Recent work, particularly the volume edited by Charles Richmond and Paul Smith, has shown, beyond what Robert Blake was able to do, the psychological complexities arising from Disraeli's background and early development.17 The influence of these factors, and also of his Jewishness, on his personality and ideas restore the fascination and sense of the exceptional that he radiated. Disraeli studies have therefore in a way come full circle, for his contemporaries and his early biographers were also either attracted or repelled by just this feeling of mystery that surrounded him. When Disraeli for the first time acquired real power in 1874, Walter Bagehot had written: His whole mind has been occupied in clever strategy; he has been trying to make five men do the work of six; he has

218

Disraeli

been devising clever policies which will divide his enemies, and little epigrams which will sting. Such work exactly suited the nature of his mind - the movements of no leader were ever so delicate, the sarcasms of no speaker were ever more fine and well placed. But in all other matters he was simply a tolerated deficiency. If you pointed out the monstrous inconsistency of his serious assertions, his friends said 'It is Dizzy, you know, that is his way'! If you showed some astounding inaccuracy, they said 'Yes, Dizzy goes like that'.... 18 It was a sharp picture, but more than Bagehot would have cared to admit it might be applied to almost any successful politician. Disraeli had qualities of imagination more rarely encountered in politics. They could from time to time betray him into 'monstrous inconsistencies', but they have kept his reputation alive. At the end of the twentieth century the Conservative party is again searching for a way forward from a great electoral defeat. The name of Disraeli is bound to be invoked and many attempts will be made to emulate his exceptional survival skills. The originator of the Two Nations image can easily be claimed as the forerunner of 'compassionate conservatism'. The opponent of centralization and champion of individual liberty can equally well be claimed as a spiritual ancestor of Thatcherite, Reaganite neo-liberal conservatism. 'The maintenance of the empire of England' is perhaps more difficult, because it might emphasize the divide between Eurosceptics and Europhiles. As a potent generator of political images Disraeli remains an example to all.

Notes Abbreviations used in the notes RB Robert Blake, Disraeli (London, 1996). DD I John Vincent (ed.) Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party: Journals and Memoirs of Edward Henry, Lord Stanley 1849-1869 (Hassocks, 1978). DD II John Vincent (ed.) A Selection from the Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby, between September 1869 and March 1878 (Royal Historical Society, 1994). DL J. Matthews, M.G. Wiebe et al (eds) Benjamin Disraeli Letters 1815-1851. 5 vols (Toronto, 1982-93). MB Monypenny and Buckle, The Life of Disraeli, 2 vols (London, 1929). JR Jane Ridley, The Young Disraeli (London, 1995). Z Marquis of Zetland (ed.) Letters of Disraeli to Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield, 2 vols (London, 1929).

Introduction 1. In Falconet, the fragment of a novel he left unfinished at his death. The phrase is used of Joseph Toplady Falconet, a thinly disguised portrait of Gladstone, MB ii.1539. 2. Jonathan Parry, 'Holborn at heart', London Review of Books, 23 January 1997, quoted in Charles Richmond and Paul Smith (eds) The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli 1818-1851 (Cambridge, 1998), p.6.

1 Genius and man about town 1804-1837 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

RB, p.487. RB, p.303. Sarah Bradford, Disraeli (New York, 1983), p.3. MB i.1274. Todd M. Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History 1656-1945 (Bloomington, 1990), p.29.

220

Notes

6. Contarini Fleming, Part I, Chapter V. 7. David Eastwood, 'The Age of Uncertainty: Britain in the early nineteenth century', in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, vol.viii, p.102. 8. Mutilated Diary, DL I, pp.445-50. 9. Tancred, Book V, Chapter III. 10. Contarini Fleming, Part II, Chapter XII. 11. Contarini Fleming, Part II, Chapter XV. 12. Charles Richmond and Jerrold M. Post, MD, 'Disraeli's crucial illness', in Charles Richmond and Paul Smith (eds) The SelfFashioning of Disraeli 1818-1851 (Cambridge, 1998), pp.66-89. 13. DL I, 66, 10 March 1828. 14. The Young Duke, Book II, Chapter XVIII. 15. DL I, 110, 20 March 1831. 16. Bradford, Disraeli, p.59. 17. Patrick Brantlinger, 'Disraeli and orientalism', in Richmond and Smith (eds) Self-Fashioning, pp.90-105. 18. MB i.217. 19. JR,p.l31. 20. W. Hutcheon (ed.) Whigs and Whiggism (London, 1913), pp.16-22. 21. Mutilated Diary, DL I, p.447. 22. The Young Duke, Book V, Chapter VI. 23. DL I, 152, 9 March 1832. 24. RB, p.80. 25. Mutilated Diary, DL I, p.450. 26. Bradford, Disraeli, p.73. 27. Henrietta Temple, Book II, Chapter IV. 28. DL II, 542, 18 December 1836. 29. RB, p.87. 30. MB i.258-9. 31. Dennis Lee, Lord Lyndhurst, The Flexible Tory (Niwot, Colorado, 1994), p.91. 32. C.C.F. Greville, Memoirs 1814-1860 (edited by R. Fulford and Lytton Strachey, London, 1938), vol.III, p.118. 33. MB i.243. 34. Bradford, Disraeli, p.71. 35. Paul Smith, Disraeli. A Brief Life (Cambridge, 1996), p.47. 36. DL II, 389, 17 April 1835. 37. MB i.291-9. 38. Lee, Lyndhurst, p. 182. 39. DL II, 421, 20 August 1835. 40. DL II, 409, 2 July 1835, to Edward Beadon. 41. Printed in Hutcheon (ed.) Whigs and Whiggism, pp.111-232. 42. RB, p.130; DL II, 459, 28 December 1835, to Isaac. 43. Mutilated Diary, DL I, pp.445-6. 44. DL II, p.398. 45. DL II, 585, 5 March 1837. 46. DL II, p.358; DL II, 557, 17 January 1837, to Sarah. 47. DL II, 631, 4 July 1837. 48. DL II, 589, 18 March 1837; p.243, note 3, for D'Orsay's letter.

Notes

221

2 Politics and domesticity 1837-1841 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

DL II, 636, note 3. DL II, 646. DL II, 673,16 November 1837. DL II, 683, 5 December 1837. DL II, 686, 8 December 1837. RB, p.l48. DL III, 893. MB i.412. DL II, 31 December 1837. MBi.413. MB i.380. DL III, 861, 30 December 1838. RB, p.770-1. DL III, p.410. DL II, 897, 25 February 1839, to Sarah. MB i.455. MB i.460, Hansard, vol.48, cols.579-80. DL III, 964,13 July 1839. Hansard, vol.49, cols.246-52. Sybil, Book V, Chapter I. Coningsby, Book II, Chapter V. MB i.485. DLIII, 971, 23 July 1839. Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli (London, 1993), p. 190. DL IV, 1216, 24 February 1842. Hansard, vol.58, col.856. JR, pp.251-2. DL III, 1185. MB i.516-18. DL III, 1188. JR, p.255.

3 Young England 1841-1845 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

DL IV, 1217, 25 February 1842. DL IV, 1219, 26 February 1842. DL IV, 1230,12 March 1842. DL IV, 1226, 10 March 1842, to Mary Anne, reporting Lord Eliot. DL IV, 1255, 11 August 1842. DL IV, Appendix III, p.372. DL IV, Introduction, p.xiv, note 21. DL IV, 1229, 11 March 1842. Richard Faber, Young England (London, 1987), p.20 (Cochrane) and p.124 (Smythe). 10. RB, p.l75. 11. Faber, Young England, p.118. 12. MB i.538-9.

222 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Notes DL IV, p.xliv. MB i.575-6. MB i.577. DL IV, 1323, 29 August 1843. Coningsby, Book II, Chapter I. Coningsby, Book III, Chapter XL Coningsby, Book III, Chapter XV. Coningsby, Book IV, Chapter V. JR, p.285. MB i.587-90. MBi.639. DL IV, p.xxii. DL IV, p.xxiv. MB i.582. Book IV, Chapter II. JR, p.293. MB i.645. Faber, Young England, pp.140-1. DL IV, 1379, 27 October 1844. Sybil, Book VI, Chapter I. DL IV, 1402,1 May 1845. DL IV, 1391, 6 February 1845. MBi.710-13. DL IV, 1396, 3 March 1845. RB, p.l87. MB i.725-8; DL IV, p.xxviii. DL IV, 1453,14 December 1845. DL IV, 1460, 11 January 1846.

4 Into the lead 1845-1849 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

DL IV, 1444, 17 September 1845. Hansard, vol.83, col.95. DL IV, 1455, 17 December 1845. Sarah Bradford, Disraeli (New York, 1983), p. 127; RB, p.224. Lord George Bentinck, Chapter III. MB i.754. Donald Read, Peel and the Victorians (Oxford, 1987), p.210. Norman Gash, Pillars of Government (London, 1986), pp.162-77; 'Lord George Bentinck and his sporting world'. MB i.761. The Times, 21 February 1846. RB, p.233. DL IV, 1477, 28 March 1846. MB i.785. RB, p.237. MB i.794-5. Read, Peel, p.230. DL IV, 1499, 29 June 1846.

Notes 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

223

Lord George Bentinck, Chapter XVIII. Lord George Bentinck, Chapter XVIII. JR, p.342. DL IV, 1514, 28 August 1846, to George Mathew. Tancred, Book III, Chapter IV. Tancred, Book III, Chapter VI. DL V, 1730, 18 October 1848, to Mary Anne. MB i.830. Robert Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party 1830-1867 (London and New York, 1978), p.228. MB i.836-8. MB i.886. DL IV, 1619, 30 December 1847; note 1, Manners on Newdegate, previous day. MB i.917. MB i.921-4. DL V,1643,1 May 1848. MB i.937-41. MB i.951. DL V, 1769, 13 January 1849. DD I, p.l, 20 March 1849. DLV, 1788.

5 Towards office 1849-1852 1. Robert Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party 1830-1867 (London and New York, 1978), p.233. 2. DL V, 1635, to Sarah, 7 March 1848. 3. MB i.1016. 4. DL V, 1801, 18 March 1849. 5. DL V, 1902, 19 October 1849. 6. MB i.1039-42. 7. MB i.1035. 8. RB, p.297. 9. Stewart, Conservative Party, p.248. 10. DL V, 1857, 18July 1849. 11. RB, p.291. 12. DL V, 1996, 24 April 1850, to George Lathom Browne. 13. DL V, 1992,18 April 1850, to Sarah. 14. DL V, 2036, 27 August 1850. 15. RB, p.297. 16. DLV, p.532. 17. DL V, 1790, 23 February 1849. 18. DD I, 11 February 1851; DL V, 2097, note 1. 19. DD I, p.51, 28 February 1851. 20. DL V, 2105, 8 March 1851. 21. DD I, p.50, 28 February 1851. 22. Lord George Bentinck, Chapter XXIV. 23. DD I, p.32.

224

Notes

24. DD I, p.62, 15 April 1851; DL V, 2122, 20 April 1851, to Lady Londonderry; DD I, p.65, 11 May 1851. 25. RB, p.317. 26. DD I, p.76, 19 July 1852. 27. RB, p.337. 28. DD I, p.90, 16 December 1852; Stewart, Conservative Party, p.261.

6 A long haul 1853-1859 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

DD I, p.213, 10 April 1864. MB i.1308. MB i.1311. Angus Hawkins, Parliament, Party and the Art of Politics in Britain, 1855-59 (Basingstoke and London, 1987), p.56. Robert Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party 1830-1867 (London and New York, 1978), p.293. DD I, p.72,Junel852. DD I, p.173, 17 June 1861. K.T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland 1832-1885 (Oxford, 1984), p.280. DD I, p.104, 5 April 1853. The Times, 17 January 1854. DD I, p.90, 17 December 1852. DD I, p.33, 1851. MB i.1365. MBi.1341. MB i.1323. DD I, p.108, 30 June 1853. MB i.1328. C.C.F. Greville, Memoirs, 1814-1860, ed. Roger Fulford and Lytton Strachey (London, 1938), vol.VI, p.404. DD I, p.121, 23 February 1854. Helen M. Swartz and Marvin Swartz (eds) Disraeli's Reminiscences (London, 1975), p.18. MB i.1457. MB i.1300; Hansard, cxxiv.245-82. Malmesbury, Memoirs of an Ex-Minister (London, 1884), vol.1, p.434, 12 May 1854. MB i.1363. MB i.1420-1. DD I, p.140, November 1855. RB, pp.376-7. Malmesbury, Memoirs, vol.11, p.417. DD I, p.156, 21 February 1858. Hawkins, Parliament, Party, p.lll. RB, p.383. T.A. Jenkins (ed.) The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny 1858-1865 (Royal Historical Society, Camden 4th series, vol.40, 1990), p.49, 11 June 1858.

Notes

225

33. Edinburgh Review, vol.106, p.258. 34. Hawkins, Parliament, Party, p.178. 35. Hawkins, Parliament, Party, p.235.

7 Frustration and triumph 1859-1868 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

MB ii.27-8; DD I, p.170, 20 April 1861. MB ii.20. MB ii.23ff. MB ii.34; DD I, p.172, 3 June 1861. DD I, 186-7, 3 June 1862. RB, p.430. DD I, p.218, 3 June 1864. DD I, p.179, 30 November 1861. E.D. Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism 1855-1865 (Cambridge, 1991), p.187. MB ii.96. MB ii.105. RB, p.434. MB ii.117. Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli (London, 1993), Chapter XX, pp.419-36. MBii.150-2. T.A. Jenkins (ed.) The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny 1858-1865 (Royal Historical Society, Camden 4th series, vol.40, 1990), p.278, 11 May 1864. For full accounts of the reform question from 1865 to 1868, see mainly F.B. Smith, The Making of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1966) and Maurice Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution. The Passing of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1967). For a summary, see E.J. Feuchtwanger, Democracy and Empire: Britain 1865-1914 (vol.9 of The New History of England, London, 1985), Chapter I, pp.27-54. RB, p.445. DD I, p.256, 29 June 1866. DD I, p.261, 25 July 1866. MB ii.194. C.C. Eldridge, Disraeli and the New Imperialism (Cardiff, 1996), p.85. MB ii.205. Eldridge, New Imperialism, pp.27ff. E.J. Feuchtwanger, Disraeli, Democracy and the Tory Party (Oxford 1968), p.42. DD I, p.301, 13 April 1867. N.E. Johnson (ed.) The Diary of Gathorne Hardy, Later Lord Cranbrook, 1866-1892 (Oxford 1981), p.37, 13 April 1867. Paul Smith (ed.) Lord Salisbury on Politics: A Selection from his Articles in the Quarterly Review (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 257-8.

226

Notes

29. MB ii.287. 30. RB, p.482; MB ii.289; Paul Smith, Disraeli (Cambridge, 1996), p.149. 31. Paul Smith, 'Disraeli's polities', in Charles Richmond and Paul Smith (eds) The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli 1818-1851 (Cambridge, 1998), p.152.

8 Up and down the greasy pole 1868-1874 1. Niall Ferguson, The World's Banker. The History of the House of Rothschild (London, 1998), p.844. 2. Ferguson, The World's Banker, p.536. 3. RB, p.487. 4. Sarah Bradford, Disraeli (New York, 1983), p.281. 5. MB ii.364; Angus Hawkins and John Powell (eds) The Journal of John Wodehouse, First Earl of Kimberley, for 1862-1902 (Royal Historical Society, Camden 5th series, vol.9, 1997), 4 April 1868. John Whalley was a seventeenth-century 'quack', selling universal medicines and astrological works. 6. MB ii.359. 7. MB ii.841. 8. MB ii.639. 9. Lothair, Book I, Chapter XXVII. 10. Lothair, Book I, Chapter XVII. 11. Lothair, Book I, Chapter XXVIII. 12. William White, The Inner Life of the House of Commons (London, 1897, reprinted 1973, with an introduction by E.J. Feuchtwanger), Chapter XXVII, p.141. 13. MB ii.462. 14. MB ii.473. 15. DD II, p.85, 24 July 1871. 16. DD II, p.102-4, 30 March to 6 April 1872. 17. MB ii 523-36; The Times, 4 April and 25 June 1872. 18. MBii.472. 19. T.E. Kebbel (ed.) Selected Speeches of the Rt Hon. the Earl of Beaconsfield (London, 1882), vol.11, pp.529ff. 20. T.A. Jenkins (ed.) The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1868-1873 (Royal Historical Society, Camden 5th series, vol.3, 1994), 6 February 1873. 21. E.J. Feuchtwanger, Disraeli, Democracy and the Tory Party (Oxford, 1968), p.96, note 1, and p.49. 22. MB ii.607. 23. MB ii.620.

9 Apotheosis 1874-1878 1. Z i.72,18 April 1874.

Notes 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

227

MB ii.599. The Times, 2 February 1874. MB ii.674. DD II, 12 October 1873. E.J. Feuchtwanger, Disraeli, Democracy and the Tory Party (Oxford, 1968), p.217. Iddesleigh Papers, 50018/141, Northcote to Disraeli, 25 January 1874. DD II, p.220. Z i.260, 29 June 1879. N.E. Johnson (ed.) The Diary of Gathorne Hardy, Later Lord Cranbrook, 1866-1892 (Oxford, 1981), p.281, 11 July 1876. MB ii.824; see also Feuchtwanger, Disraeli, Democracy, pp. 18-19; Roland Shannon, The Age of Disraeli, 1867-1881: The Rise of Tory Democracy (Cambridge, 1998), pp.218-20. Quoted in E.J. Feuchtwanger, Gladstone (2nd edn, Basingstoke, 1989), p.181. Z i.195, 2 February 1875, to Lady Bradford. Z i.268, 29 July, 270, 30 July, 271, 3 August. Sir H.W. Lucy A Diary of Two Parliaments, vol.1, p.139, 5 April 1876. DD II, p.250, 6 November 1875. DD II, p.269, 15 January 1876. DD II, p.275, 3 February 1876. RB, p.562. Quoted in C.C. Eldridge, Disraeli and the Rise of a New Imperialism (Cardiff, 1996), p.54. MB ii.758. DD II, p.306. DD II, p.247. G. Cecil, Life of Robert Marquis of Salisbury, vol.11, 1868-1880 (London, 1921), p.145. Richard Millman, Britain and the Eastern Question 1875-1878 (Oxford, 1979), p.104. Z i.289,1 October 1875. Millman, Eastern Question, p.168. Shannon, Age of Disraeli, p.270. Z ii.55. DD II, p.297. MB ii.920. RB, p.606. Millman, Eastern Question, p.142. Z ii.69. Millman, Eastern Question, p.237. MB ii.979. Sarah Bradford, Disraeli (New York, 1983), p.338. Richmond Papers, Cairns to the Duke of Richmond, 31 July 1877. DD II, p.418, 12 July 1877. Hardy Diary, p.341, 29 October 1877. DD II, p.442, 5 October 1877.

228 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Notes DD II, p.413, 30 June 1877. DD II, p.455. Cecil, Salisbury, vol.ii, p.171. Shannon, Age of Disraeli, p.300. Hughenden Papers, Northcote letters, Northcote to Beaconsfield, 25 January 1878. Harrowby Papers, vol.L, A.B. Forwood to Lord Sandon, 30 January and 30 March 1878. Millman, Eastern Question, p.476, note 15. Tancred, Book IV, Chapter 3. MB ii.1194, to Queen Victoria, 17 June 1878. Shannon, Age of Disraeli, p.306. MB ii.1228-9.

10 Anticlimax 1878-1881 1. Richard Shannon, The Age of Disraeli, 1868-1881: The Rise of Tory Democracy (London and New York, 1992), p.305. 2. MB ii.1369. 3. MB ii.1371. 4. RBp.721. 5. Iddesleigh Papers, 50018, Northcote to Beaconsfield, 23 December 1878. 6. Z ii.200, 27 December 1878. 7. DD II, p.464, 17 December 1877. 8. Sir Arthur Hardinge, The Life of Henry Howard Molyneux Herbert, Fourth Earl of Carnarvon 1831-1890 (London, 1925), vol.ii, p.74. 9. Z ii.189, 27 September 1878. 10. MB ii.1292. 11. MB ii.1251. 12. R.E. Foster, Lord Randolph Churchill: A Political Life (Oxford, 1981), p.205. 13. Z ii.208, 13 February 1879. 14. MB ii.1367. 15. H.C.G. Matthew, 'Rhetoric and Politics in Britain, 1860-1950', in P.J. Waller (ed.) Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain (Brighton, 1987), pp.34-58. 16. H.C.G. Matthew, Introduction to The Gladstone Diaries, vol.IX, p.lxii. 17. Iddesleigh Papers, 50018, Northcote to Beaconsfield, 29 July 1879. 18. P.J. Waller, Democracy and Sectarianism. A Political and Social History of Liverpool 1868-1939 (Liverpool, 1981), pp.33-4. 19. MB ii.1387. 20. Quoted in Cornelius O'Leary, The Elimination of Corrupt Practices in British Elections 1868-1911 (Oxford, 1962), p.113, note 1. 21. MBii.1448-9. ,22. Sarah Bradford, Disraeli (New York,1983), p.384. 23. MB ii.1539.

Notes 24. 25. 26. 27.

229

Z ii.278,14 June 1880, to Lady Bradford. Z ii.279. Shannon, Age of Disraeli, p.414. RB p.753.

11 Afterlife: the rise of the Disraeli myth 1. Julian Amery, The Life of Joseph Chamberlain, vol.vi (London, 1969), p.848. 2. Bruno Bauer, Disraelis romantischer und Bismarcks sozialistischer Imperialismus (Chemnitz, 1882). 3. R.F. Foster, Lord Randolph Churchill (Oxford, 1981), p.103. 4. E.J. Feuchtwanger, 'The rise and progress of Tory Democracy', in J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann (eds) Britain and the Netherlands, vol.V: Some Political Mythologies (The Hague, 1975), p.177. 5. John Morley, Life of Gladstone (London, 1903), vol.iii, p.132, 11 February 1885. 6. RB, p.712. 7. T.E. Kebbel, A History of Toryism (London, 1886), pp.334-6. 8. J.A. Froude, The Earl of Beaconsfield (London, 1890). 9. H.C.G. Matthew, Introduction to The Gladstone Diaries, vol.ix (Oxford, 1986), p.l. 10. Georg Brandes, Lord Beaconsfield (Benjamin Disraeli): Ein Charakterbild (Berlin, 1879), p.14. 11. W.S. Churchill, Lord Randolph Churchill, 2 vols (London, 1906). 12. B.R. Jerman, The Young Disraeli (Princeton, 1960). 13. Paul Smith, Disraelian Conservatism and Social Reform (London, 1967). 14. P.R. Ghosh, 'Style and substance in Disraelian social reform, c.1860-80', in P.J. Waller (ed.) Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain (Brighton, 1987). 15. P.R. Ghosh, 'Disraelian Conservatism: A financial approach', English Historical Review, vol.99 (1984). 16. C.C. Eldridge, England's Mission: The Imperial Idea in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli, 1868-80 (London, 1973). 17. Charles Richmond and Paul Smith (eds) The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli 1818-1851 (Cambridge, 1998). Also Paul Smith, 'Disraeli's polities', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, vol.37 (London, 1987), pp.65-85. 18. Written in 1874, published after Bagehot's death in The Fortnightly Review, vol.xxiv, December 1878. Quoted in N.St John Stevas (ed.) The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot (London, 1974), vol.vii, p.234.

Select bibliography Unless otherwise stated, place of publication is London.

Sources For much of the documentation The Life of Disraeli by W.F. Monypenny and G. Buckle (edition in two volumes, 1929) remains essential. Disraeli's own letters should be consulted in Benjamin Disraeli Letters, J. Matthews, M.G. Wiebe et al. (eds), 5 vols, 1815-51 (Toronto, 1982-93), a major work of scholarship. After 1851 the most important collection of letters is Marquis of Zetland (ed.) The Letters of Disraeli to Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield, 2 vols (1929). The following diaries are of great value: J. Vincent (ed.) Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party: Journals and Memoirs of Edward Henry, Lord Stanley 1849-1869 (Hassocks, 1978); J. Vincent (ed.) A Selection from the Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby, between September 1869 and March 1878 (Camden 5th series, vol.4, Royal Historical Society, 1994); also N.E. Johnson (ed.) The Diary of Gathorne Hardy, later Lord Cranbrook, 1866-1892: Political Selections (Oxford, 1981). For Disraeli's speeches, see also T.E. Kebbel (ed.) Selected Speeches of the late Rt. Hon. Earl of Beaconsfield, 2 vols (1882), Hansard and The Times. For pamphlets and newspaper letters, see, besides the Toronto edition of Letters, W. Hutcheon (ed.) Whigs and Whiggism. Political Writings of Benjamin Disraeli (1913); also H.M. Swartz and M. Swartz (eds) Disraeli's Reminiscences (1975).

Select bibliography

231

Biographies Robert Blake, Disraeli (1966), is the major modern biography. The most recent scholarly reassessment is Paul Smith, Disraeli: A Brief Life (Cambridge, 1996). Useful, especially on his personal life: S. Bradford, Disraeli (New York, 1983), and S. Weintraub, Disraeli (1993). For his thought and writings: J. Vincent, Disraeli (Oxford, 1990) and J. Ridley, The Young Disraeli (1995). Short recent assessments include I. Machin (1995), J. Walton (1990) and R.W. Davis (1976). J.A. Froude, Life of the Earl of Beaconsfield (1890) is still worth reading.

The Conservative party Three volumes of the Longman History of the Conservative Party are essential: R. Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party 1830-1867 (1978); R. Shannon, The Age of Disraeli, 1867-1881: The Rise of Tory Democracy (1992) and The Age of Salisbury: Unionism and Empire (1996). Also R. Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Thatcher (1985), B. Coleman, Conservatism and the Conservative Party in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1988), and T.A. Jenkins, Disraeli and Victorian Conservatism (1996).

Special periods and aspects Background, early life and writings C. Richmond and P. Smith (eds), The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli 1818-1851 (Cambridge, 1998); B.R. Jerman, The Young Disraeli (Princeton, 1960); D.R. Schwarz, Disraeli's Fiction (1979).

Early political life N. Gash, Sir Robert Peel (1972); I. Newbould, Whiggery and Reform 1830-1841 (1990); P. Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals 1830-1852 (Oxford, 1990); R. Faber, Young England (1987); R. Stewart, The Politics of Protection: Lord Derby and the

232

Select bibliography

Protectionist Party 1841-1 852 (Cambridge, 1971); T.A. Jenkins, Parliament, Party and Politics in Victorian Britain (Manchester, 1996).

Mid-century politics J. Prest, Lord John Russell (1972); J. Ridley, Lord Palmerston (1970); H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809-1 875 (Oxford, 1986); J. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (1993); J.B. Conacher, The Peelites and the Party System 1846-52 (Newton Abbot, 1972); P.R. Ghosh, ‘Disraelian Conservatism: A financial approach’, English Historical Review, vo1.99 (1984);A. Hawkins, Parliament, Party and the Art of Politics in Britain 1855-59 (1987); E.D. Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism 1855-1 865 (cambridge, 1991).

Later political life H.J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management: Politics in the Time of Disraeli and Gladstone (1959);F.B. Smith, The Making of the Second Reform Act (Cambridge, 1966); M. Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution (Cambridge, 1967); E.J. Feuchtwanger, Disraeli, Democracy and the Tory Party (Oxford, 1968); P. Smith, Disraelian Conservatism and Social Reform (1967); P.R. Ghosh, ‘Style and substance in Disraelian social reform, c. 1860-80’, in P.J. Waller (ed.) Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain (Brighton, 1987); H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1875-1 898 (Oxford, 1995).

Foreign and imperial policy C.C. Eldridge, Disraeli and the Rise of a New Imperialism (Cardiff, 1996); M. Swartz, The Politics of British Foreign Policy in the Era of Disraeli and Gladstone (1985);R. Millman, Britain and the Eastern Question, 1875-78 (Oxford, 1979); R.T. Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1876 (1963).

Chronology

1804 1817 1825-6 1828 1828-30 1830-1 1831 1832

1833

1834 1835

1836 1837

1838 1839

Born 21 December 31 July: baptized into the Church of England Involved in launching The Representative The Voyage of Popanilla Disraeli's breakdown Eastern tour The Young Duke England and France; or a Cure for Ministerial Gallomania Contarini Fleming June: Stands as Radical in High Wycombe by-election December: stands again at High Wycombe in first election of the reformed parliament Issues pamphlet What is He? in preparation for possible Marylebone by-election The Wondrous Tale of Alroy Starts affair with Lady Henrietta Sykes Hartlebury The Revolutionary Epick January: third failure to win High Wycombe as an Independent Radical May: stands as Tory in Taunton by-election Runnymede Letters End of affair with Lady Henrietta Sykes July: elected for Maidstone with Wyndham Lewis Henrietta Temple Venetia December: maiden speech March: death of Wyndham Lewis August: marriage to Mrs Wyndham Lewis

234 1841

1842-5 1844 1845 1846

1847

1848

1849 1850 1851 1852

1853 1854-6 1855 1857 1858

1859

Chronology July: elected for Shrewsbury September: Peel forms government without including Disraeli Young England Coningsby June: Peel reverses defeat on sugar duties April: Disraeli attacks Peel on Maynooth Grant Sybil January: Disraeli galvanizes opposition to repeal of the corn laws June: Peel resigns Tancred July: elected unopposed as member for Buckinghamshire in general election December: vote on admission of Jews to parliament February: Lord George Bentinck resigns leadership August: Disraeli sums up session for Protectionist Tories September: death of Lord George Bentinck December: Hughenden purchase completed Disraeli becomes de facto leader of Protectionist Tories in the Commons July: death of Peel February: unsuccessful attempt to form Tory government February: first Derby minority government formed. Disraeli becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer July: general election leaves Tories largest group, but without majority December: government, defeated on Disraeli's budget, resigns January: Aberdeen Coalition formed Crimean War February: Derby refuses to take office after Aberdeen's resignation. Palmerston becomes prime minister March: Palmerston defeated in the Commons, but general election increases his majority February: Palmerston defeated on Conspiracy to Murder bill. Second Derby-Dizzy minority government formed Conservative reform bill defeated. June: General election leaves Tories in minority. Second Palmerston government formed.

Chronology 1860-5 1860 1864 1865 1866 1867

1868

1869 1870 1872

1873 1874 1875 1876

1877 1878 1879

1880

1881

235

American Civil War December: death of prince consort July: Palmerston escapes defeat on Schleswig-Holstein question July: general election leaves Conservatives in minority October: death of Palmerston. Russell becomes prime minister June: Russell resigns after defeat on reform bill. Third Derby-Dizzy minority government formed February: Conservative reform bill introduced April: defeat of Gladstone's amendments May: amendment enfranchising compounder accepted February: Disraeli succeeds Derby as prime minister December: resigns after defeat in general election. Gladstone becomes prime minister Gladstone's Irish Church disestablishment bill passes Liberal divisions on education bill. Franco-Prussian war April: Disraeli's visit to Lancashire signals Conservative revival December: death of Mary Anne March: Disraeli refuses to take office after Gladstone's defeat on Irish University bill February: Disraeli becomes prime minister after victory in general election Conservative social legislation November: Suez Canal shares purchased August: Disraeli becomes Earl of Beaconsfield September: Gladstone's pamphlet on Bulgarian atrocities published April: Russo-Turkish war December: fall of Plevna March: call-up of reserves. Derby resigns June-July: Congress of Berlin meets January: Chelmsford defeated at Isandhlwana September: British mission slaughtered in Kabul November: Gladstone's first Midlothian campaign March: dissolution of parliament April: Disraeli resigns. Gladstone becomes prime minister Endymion. 19 April: death of Disraeli

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Index

Abercorn, 1st Duke of, 149 Aberdeen, 4th Earl of, 86, 97, 98, 101, 103, 105, 106, 108, 132 Abergavenny, 1st Marquis of, Lord Neville, 128, 147, 156, 212 Acton, Lord, 186, 213 Adderley, Sir Charles, 176-7 Adelaide, Queen, 38 Adullam, Cave of, 131, 133, 137 Afghanistan, 44, 198-9 Agricultural Holdings Act, 176, 196 agricultural protection societies, 63 Alabama claims, 154 Albert, Prince, 1, 40, 65, 78, 79, 98, 101, 106, 126-7 Alroy, Wondrous Tale of, 11-12, 28 American Civil War, 122-3 Andrassy, Count, 182 Anti-Corn Law League, 35, 63 anti-Semitism, 3, 51, 88, 184, 193, see also Jews, Judaism Applegarth, William, 156 Argyll, 8th Duke of, 214 Artisans' Dwellings Act, 174 Ashley, Lord, from 1851 7th Earl of Shaftesbury (q.v.), 52-3, 64 Attwood, Thomas, 36 Austen, Benjamin and Sara, 7, 13, 19, 26 Bagehot, Walter, 69, 164, 217 Baillie-Cochrane, Alexander, 1st Lord Lamington, 46, 47 Balfour, A.J., 181, 208, 209 Bankes, George, 80 Baring, Sir Thomas, 87 Barnes, Thomas, 25 Bath, by-election (1873), Batoum, 192 Baxter, Dudley, 140

Bedchamber crisis, 40 Bentham, Jeremy, 14 Bentinck, G.P., 'Big Ben', 120 Bentinck, Lord George, 64, 71, 72, 73, 75 emerges as leader of Protectionists, 64-9 vote on 'Jew Bill' (1847), 73-4 resigns leadership, 74 death, 76 D. writes biography of, 87-9 Beresford, William, 74, 77, 82, 86, 96 Berlin, Congress of, 191-2, 194 Berlin Memorandum, 182 Besika Bay, 188 Birmingham caucus, 139 Birmingham Political Union, 36 Bismarck, Otto von, 122, 123, 135, 140, 154, 171, 181, 192, 206-7, 211 Blackwood, Helen, 17 Blake, Robert, 216, 217 Blackwood's Magazine, 63 Blessington, Lady, 16, 26 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, 14, 23, 48 Bolton, Dr George and Clara, 15 Bonham, F.R., 41 Bosnia, 180-2, 191 Bowring, Sir John, 110 Bradenham, 8, 20, 21, 26, 33, 39, 43, 55, 71 Bradford, Selina Countess of, 162-3, 167, 169, 173, 176, 181, 184, 185, 186, 191, 198, 206 Bridgewater House meeting (1880), 205, 208 Bright, John, 84, 93, 99, 100, 111, 116, 120, 131, 134, 137, 145 Brown, John, 144

238

Index

Brunnow, Count de, 87, 135 Brydges Willyams, Mrs Sarah, 103, 109, 127, 163, 213 Buckingham, 2nd Duke of, Lord Chandos (q.v.), 38, 42, 44, 63 Buckingham, 3rd Duke of, 133 Buckinghamshire, 8, 26, 71-2, 114, 185 Buckle, G.E., see Monypenny and Buckle Bulgaria, 191 Bulgarian atrocities, 111, 182-6, 195, 201 Bulwer, Edward Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, 9, 12 , 15, 34, 64, 197 Burdett, Sir Francis, 14 Burghley House meeting (1872), 157-8 Byron, Lord, ix, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 15,19, 26, 28, 192 Cairns, Hugh McCalmont, 1st Earl, 153, 157, 167, 187, 188, 204, 208 Callender, W.R., 168 Cambridge, George, Duke of, 199 Canning, 1st Earl, 113 Canning, George, 6, 18, 44, 50, 57, 64, 67, 114 Cardwell, Edward, 157, 199 Carlyle, Thomas, 46, 139, 141, 214 Carnarvon, 4th Earl of, 124, 162, 167, 173 resigns (1867), 136 as colonial secretary, 170, 198 resigns (1878), 189 Carrington, 2nd Baron, 89 Cavagnari, Sir Louis, 199 Cecil, Lord Robert, 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, Viscount Cranborne (1865-8, q.v.), 120, 124, 130, 133 hostility to D., 120 article in Quarterly, 120 Chamberlain, Joseph, 201, 208, 209, 211 Chandos, Lord, from 1839 2nd Duke of Buckingham (q.v.), 18, 31, 35, 38 Chartism, 37, 38, 76, 129 Chelmsford, 2nd Baron, 199 Chesterfield, Lady, 162-3, 199, 206, 208 Churchill, Lord Randolph, 202, 208, 212-13, 215 Clanricarde, 1st Marquis of, 112

Clarendon, 4th Earl of, 116, 132 Clay, James, 9, 10 Cobden, Richard, 54, 57, 66, 84, 99, 100, 104, 111 Colburn, Henry, 7 Coningsby, xi, 4, 14, 37, 47, 50-2, 54, 55, 68, 69 Constantinople, x, 7, 186-7, 188 Contarini Fleming, 7, 11-12 Corry, Montague, 1st Lord Rowton, 133, 148, 162, 166, 167, 190, 202, 206, 216 Cranborne, Viscount, from 1868 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, till 1865 Lord Robert Cecil (q.v.) joins government (1866), 133 resigns, 136 article in Quarterly, 140 Cranbrook, 1st Earl of, see Hardy, Gathorne Crimean War, 105-8, 115, 189 Crocker, J.W., 41 Cross, R.A., 1st Viscount, 167, 171, 172-3, 177, 203 Crystal Palace, D.'s speech at, 158, 160-1 Cyprus, 192 Darwin, Charles, 125, 184, 186 Delane, John T., 65, 114, 132, 157 Derby, Edward Stanley, from 1851 14th Earl of, see also Stanley, Edward, 1, 4, 18, 92, 96, 99, 100, 101, 108, 110, 111, 114, 115, 117, 119, 120,121, 123, 130, 131, 137, 139, 147, 148, 153, 179, 212 relationship with D., 82, 98 forms government (1852), 90-1 appetite for office, 95 as 'the Chief, 97 remonstrates with D. on East India Company debate (1853), 104 fails to form government (1855), 106-7 lack of contact with D. (1856), 109 forms 2nd government, 112-13 and preparation of 1859 Reform Bill, 116 refuses D.'s resignation (1865), 128-9 forms 3rd government, 132-3 takes up parliamentary reform, 134-6 final resignation, 144

Index Derby, Edward Henry Stanley, from 1869 15th Earl of, see also Stanley, Edward Henry, 156, 157, 159, 162, 164, 173, 177, 178, 182, 183, 185, 187 declines leadership in Lords, 153 as possible leader, 158, 165 in formation of 1874 government, 167, 170 as foreign secretary, 179-81, 188 tensions with D. over foreign policy, 188-9 resignation, 190 Derby, Lady (formerly Lady Salisbury), 158, 162, 189, 190 Disraeli, Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield works, see separate headings birth, background and education, 6-12 baptism, 3 Jewishness, ix, 2-3, 11-13, 21, 30, 38, 40, 51, 69-70, 73, 77, 88-9, 143, 152, 183-4 debts, xi, 6, 9, 19, 25-6, 34, 38, 40, 43, 59, 82, 87, 91, 103 launch of Representative, 6 breakdown, 8 Eastern journey, 9-10 attempts to enter parliament, 12-14, 19, 21, 27, 39-40 as journalist, 22, 25, 97 maiden speech, 30-1 marriage, 33-5, 83, 102, 127 attitude to Chartism, 37-8 pressed by creditors, 39, 43, 82-3 fails to obtain office from Peel, 40-2 as leader of Young England, 46-8 visit to Paris (1842), 45-6 starts to attack Peel, 49 visit to Paris (1845), 59 approach to Palmerston, 59, 66, 84, 90-1, 100, 104, 116-17 opens attack on Corn Law repeal, 62-3 final clash with Peel (May 1846), 66-7 becomes member for Buckinghamshire, 71-2 vote on Jewish disabilities (1847), 73-4 revolutions of 1848, 75-6, 79 recognized as leader, 76-8 attempts to jettison protection, 79-81, 83

239 disappointment at failure to form government (1851), 86-7 as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1852), 91, 93-4 as opposition leader, 78, 82, 97-9, 100-1, 106-8, 111-12, 119-22 sets up The Press, 97 attitude to Crimean War, 105 fall of Aberdeen Coalition, 105 detachment from his party, 104, 109-10 defeat of Palmerston (March 1857), 110-11 views on Indian mutiny, 111 as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1858-9), 115 attempts to stave off defeat (1859), 118 mounts Church defence campaign, 124-5 visit to Oxford (1864), 125 contemplates retirement (1865), 128-9 tactics on Liberal Reform Bill, 130-2 formation of 1866 government, 133 on colonies and empire, 134-5 decision to introduce Reform Bill, 135 parliamentary tactics (1867), 135-8 becomes prime minister, 144 ecclesiastical appointments, 148 election campaign (1868), 147-9 resignation, 150 peerage for Mary Anne, 150 on Irish Church Disestablishment Bill, 153 on Education Bill, 154 on Franco-Prussian War, 154-5 on New Social Movement, 155-6 appoints Gorst party agent, 156 attempts to displace him as leader (1872), 157-8 Manchester Free Trade Hall speech, 159-60 on foreign and imperial policy, 160-1 death of Mary Anne, 162 relations with Ladies Bradford and Chesterfield, 162-3 declines office (1873), 163 forms government (1874), 167-8 on Public Worship Regulation Bill, 170-1 and domestic politics, 171-4 and trade union legislation, 173

240

Index

Disraeli, Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield - contd and Education Bill (1876), 174-5 and Plimsoll agitation, 176 and Royal Titles Bill, 177-8 purchase of Suez Canal shares, 178, 180 relations with Derby, 179-82 views on Eastern Question, 180, 182-3 rejects Berlin Memorandum, 182 on Bulgarian atrocities, 182 accepts peerage, 185 anti-Semitic attacks, 183-4 Constantinople conference, 186 and Russo-Turkish war, 187 Derby's resignation, 189-90 attends Berlin Congress, 191-2 blames 'bad trade', 195, 197 refuses to return to protection, 196 imperial setbacks, 198-200 failure to respond to Midlothian campaign, 201 dissolution of parliament, 194-5, 202-3 defeat and resignation, 204-5 on Compensation for Disturbance Bill, 207-8 attitude to Fourth Party, 208-9 death, 209 and social imperialism, 211 and Tory Democracy, 212-14 biography and historiography, 214-18 Disraeli, Isaac, 2-3, 4, 5, 8, 12, 15, 25, 28, 71, 77 Disraeli, Mary Anne, see also Lewis, Mrs Wyndham, 32, 36, 39-40, 43, 44, 45, 54, 59, 68, 71, 86, 102, 103, 105, 126-7, 138, 143, 157 marriage, 33-5 as hostess, 38 and D.'s debts, 39, 43, 59 requests office for D., 40-1 marital tension, 83, 127 growing eccentricity, 102, 126 becomes Viscountess Beaconsfield, 150 death, 162 Disraeli, Sarah, 3, 9, 17, 20, 21, 22, 27, 30, 31, 39, 41, 45, 56, 60, 61, 78, 83, 127 Don Pacifico, 84 D'Orsay, Count, 16, 26, 28, 40, 45, 64

Dreikaiserbund, 182 Drummond, Henry, 80 Duncombe, Thomas, 37, 56 Durham, 1st Earl of, 19 Dyke, Sir William Hart, 189-90, 192 Earle, Ralph, 109, 115, 123, 133 East India Company, 103, 112 Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, 85, 86 Eldridge, C.C., 217 elections, general (1832), 14 (1835), 19 (1837), 27 (1841), 39-40 (1847), 72-3 (1852), 91-2 (1857), 111 (1859), 117 (1865), 128-9 (1868), 147-50 (1874), 165-6 (1880), 195, 201-5 Ellenborough, 1st Earl of, 113-4 Employers and Workmen Act, 172 Endymion, 47, 206-7 Faber, Frederick, 46 Falconet, 207 Fielden, John, 38, 42 Ford, G.S., 39 Fortnightly Review, 213 Forwood, Arthur, 190 Fourth Party, 208, 212 Freeman, E.A., 184, 186 Freemantle, T.F., 44, 45 Frere, Sir Bartle, 199 Froude, J.A., 198, 214 Galignani's Messenger, 59 Gallomania, 14 Ghosh, Peter, 216 Gibson, Thomas Milner, 111 Gladstone, W.E., 4, 47, 53, 83, 84, 85, 95, 98, 103, 110, 115, 118, 120, 121, 128, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 143, 147, 150, 153, 161, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 185, 186, 190,192, 193, 195, 203, 205, 207, 210, 211, 213-14, 215 candidate at Newark, 46 D.'s view of Maynooth resignation, 56 described by D. as future Tory leader, 69

241

Index offered office by Stanley (1851), 86 on D.'s 1852 budget, 93-4 disliked by Tories as Puseyite, 100 in 1855 government crisis, 107 in formation of 2nd Derby government, 113, 114 opposes Palmerston on defence expenditure, 122, 123 on franchise extension (1864), 129 introduces Reform Bill (1866), 131 defeated on Reform Bill (1867), 137 on Irish Church, 145-8 defeated in South Lancashire, 149 D. more popular, 158, 162 defeat on Irish University Bill, 163 dissolves parliament (1874), 165 resigns Liberal leadership, 175 joins atrocity campaign, 183 personal hostility between him and D., 176, 183-4, 192-3, 207, 208 resolutions on Eastern Question, 187 Midlothian campaign, 196, 200-1 Irish Land Bill, 208 on D.'s death, 209 Glasgow, 26, 164 Goethe, J.W. von, x, 4 Gorst, Sir John Eldon, 156-7, 158, 165, 166, 171, 202, 208, 212, 213 Gower, Lord Ronald, 207 Granby, Lord, later 6th Duke of Rutland, 74, 77, 90 Granville, 2nd Earl, 175, 185, 186 Greenwich, 185, 200 Greville, Charles, 19, 31, 64, 104, 114, Grey, 2nd Earl, 18, 19, 64, 159, 205 Grey, 3rd Earl, 113 Grey, Colonel (later General) Charles, 14 Guizot, F.P.G., 45, 105 Haber, Baron d', 14 Hamilton, Lord George, 149, 205 Hardy, Gathorne, 1st Earl of Cranbrook, 133, 138, 156, 167, 175, 183, 188, 194, 204 Hartington, Marquis of, later 8th Duke of Devonshire, 175-6, 185, 201, 205 Hartlebury, A Year at, 20 Haydon, W.F., 150 Henley, J.W., 90, 116 Henrietta Temple, 16, 26

Herbert, Sidney, 57, 92, 107, 113 Herries, J.C., 76, 77 High Wycombe (D. as candidate), 12, 13, 14, 19, 20 Hobhouse, J.C., 1st Lord Broughton, 53, 58 Hodgkinson, Grosvenor, 138 Hope, Henry, 45 Howell, George, 156 Hughenden, 71-2, 80, 82, 83, 87, 89, 98, 102, 126, 158, 199, 206, 207, 209 Hughes, Thomas, 129 Hume, Joseph, 12, 75 Hunt, George Ward, 167 Hyde Park, 33, 133, 138 Ignatiev, Count, 186 India, 30, 99, 103-4, 111-12, 113, 133, 161, 175, 177, 179, 190, 197, 199, 211 Isandhlwana, 199 Jerman, B.R., 216 Jews, 2-3, 11-12, 21, 30, 40, 71, 73-4, 76, 82, 85, 86, 88, 89, 100, 101, 103, 104, 114, 116, 126, 141, 143, 151, 152, 157, 184, 214, 215, 217 Jolliffe, Sir William, 1st Lord Hylton, 96, 108, 117 Judaism, 2, 12, 56, 70, 73, 88, 89, 122, 126, 143, 152, 184 Kebbel, T.E., 214 Kimberley, 1st Earl of, 146 Knowsley, 98 Kossuth, Lajos, 90 Lansdowne, 3rd Marquis of, 53 Layard, Sir Henry, 7, 19, 111 Lennox, Lord Henry, 101, 109, 193 Lewis, Mrs Wyndham, Disraeli, Mary Anne (q.v.), 15, 32 Lewis, Wyndham, 27, 30,32, 33 Liverpool, 2nd Earl of, 44, 50, 65, 114 Liverpool, by-election (1880), 202 Lockhart, J.G., 6 Londonderry, Lady, 24, 29, 38, 75, 83, 102, 106 Londonderry, 3rd Marquis of, 83, 84 Longman, publisher, 207 Lord George Bentinck, 68, 76, 87- 9 Lothair, 198, 146, 151-2, 206 Louis Philippe, 45, 59, 75

242

Index

Lowe, Robert, 1st Viscount Sherbrooke, 130, 131 Lucan, 3rd Earl of, 114 Lyndhurst, John Singleton Copley, 1st Earl of, 18-25, 29, 34, 42, 71 Lytton, 1st Earl of, 197, 199 Maclise, Daniel, 16, 29 McNeile, Hugh, 148 Maginn, William, 11 Maidstone (D. as candidate, 1837), 27, 32-4, 40, 41 Malmesbury, 3rd Earl of, 81, 91, 95, 97, 101, 104, 105, 112, 115, 122, 133, 153 Malta, 9-10, 190 Manchester D.'s visit (1844), 54-5 D.'s visit (1872), 158-62 school of, 65, 77, 80, 99, 111, 112, 149 Manners, Lord John, 46, 47, 48, 49, 54, 55, 58, 62, 74, 80 Manning, Cardinal, 145-6, 151, 206 Marlborough, 7th Duke of, 124, 144, 203 Marylebone (D. as by-election candidate), 13 Maynooth Grant, 56, 58, 73 Melbourne, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 25, 27, 33, 35, 39, 44, 69 Meredith, William, 9 Metternich, Prince, 75, 77 Miall, Edward, 111 Miles, Sir Philip, 80 Miles, Sir William, 120 Mill, James, 14 Mill, James Stuart, 129, 149 Milnes, Richard Monckton, 1st Lord Houghton, 46, 52 monarchy, 68, 78, 81, 124, 126-7, 144, 158, 160, 165, 177-8 Montagu, Andrew, 103, 127 Monypenny and Buckle, xi, 215-16 Morris, William, 46, 186 Murray, John, 5-7 Naas, Lord, later 6th Earl of Mayo, 117 Napoleon, ix, x, 10, 15, 27, 105 Napoleon III, Louis Napoleon, 90, 105, 110, 112, 115, 122, 123, 140, 154, 199 Neville, Lord, see Abergavenny Nevill, Lady Dorothy, 127-8, 157, 213

Newcastle 5th Duke of, 113 Newcastle, 4th Duke of, 85 Newdegate, Charles, 74, 77, 80, 99, 120 Noel, Gerard, 158 Northcote, Sir Stafford, 162, 167, 168, 176, 190, 212 appointed president of Board of Trade (1866), 133 as chancellor of the exchequer, 172, 180, 197 as leader of the House, 183, 194, 202, 203 as possible successor to D., 194, 209, 213, attacked by Fourth Party, 208, 213 Northumberland, 6th Duke of, 195 Norton, Mrs Caroline, 17, 20, 29 Novikov, Mme Olga, 186 Oastler, Richard, 42 O'Connell, Daniel, 20, 21, 25, 30, 49, 67 Pakington Sir John, 110, 115 Palmerston, Lady, 84, 112 Palmerston, 3rd Viscount, 45, 59, 66, 68, 79, 92, 92, 98, 103, 108, 114, 115, 116, 121, 122, 126, 127,128, 130 as foreign secretary (1830-41), 14 D.'s attacks on, 44, 84 D. friendly to, 66, 84 foreign secretary (1846), 84 fall (1851), 90 declines to join Tories (1852) 90-1, (1855) 107 possible alliance with D., 100, 104, 117-18 prime minister (1855), 106-7 parliamentary defeat (1857), 110-11 defeat on Conspiracy to Murder Bill, 112 rivalry with Russell, 113 forms second government, 119-20 and Schleswig-Holstein, 123 church appointments, 124 death, 129 Parnell, C.S., 195, 203, 204, 211 Peel, General Jonathan, 136 Peel, Sir Robert, 8, 18, 20, 22, 23, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 39, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 59, 60, 63, 65, 66, 67, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 106, 214, 217

Index first meeting with D., 17 forms government (1835), 18 on D.'s Vindication of the English Constitution, 24 D.'s opinion of, 26, 35, 37, 44-5, 50, 55, 57 formation of 1841 government, 40-2 reverses votes on factory bill and sugar duties (1844), 53 D.'s attacks on (1845), 56-8 introduces corn law repeal, 61-2, 64 resignation, 68 as leader of Peelites, 68-9, 71 death, 84 Peelites, 73, 76, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 91, 92, 93, 94, 100, 110, 112, 132 Phillips, Samuel, 74, 101, Pitt, William, 27, 44, 65, 93, 95, 214 Plevna, 187, 189 Plimsoll, Samuel, 176-7 Popanilla, The Voyage of Captain, 8 Press, The, 97, 106, 108 Portland, 4th Duke of, 64, 87 Portland, 5th Duke of, 103 Potter, George, 156 Public Worship Regulation Bill, 170-1 Pusey, E.B., 85, 128 Pyne, William, 25-6 Quarterly Review, 120,140, 141, 162 Reform Bill (1832), 13, 15, 20, 22, 159 Reform Bill (1854), 104 Reform Bill (1859), 116, 131 Reform Bill (1860), 121 Reform Bill (1866), 131-2, 134 Reform Bill (1867), xi, 10, 135-40, 143, 145, 159, 162, 166, 214 Reform Bill (1884), 139 Revolutionary Epick, 19 Richmond, Charles, 217 Richmond, 5th Duke of, 63, 81, 101-2 Richmond, 6th Duke of, 136, 144 ritualism, 146, 148, 170 Roebuck, J.A., 202 Rose, Sir Philip, 10, 41, 96, 116, 156 Rothschild Alfred de, 206 Rothschild family, 51, 89, 143, 180, 156 Rothschild, Charlotte de, 126, 143

243 Rothschild, Lionel de, 51, 53, 73, 114,216 Rothschild, Sir Anthony de, 45 Royal Titles Bill, 175, 177-8, 190 Runnymede, Letters of, 25, 26, 31, 84 Ruskin, John, 46, 186 Russell, Lord John, 1st Earl Russell, 53, 71, 72, 73, 80, 86, 99, 112, 113, 117, 121, 131 D.'s speech on his education grant (1839), 36 Edinburgh letter (1845), 59 forms government (1846), 68 'papal aggression', 85 resigns (1852), 90 need for office, 95 attacks D. on Jewish question (1854), 104 loses City seat (1857), 111 as foreign secretary, 123 prime minister (1865), 129 resigns (1866), 132 Rutland, 5th Duke of, 47, 54 Salisbury, from 1868 3rd Marquis of, Lord Robert Cecil, from 1865 Viscount Cranborne (q.v.), 173, 174, 178, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 204, 205, 207, 213, 217 hostility to D., 145 possible leader of Tory peers (1869-70), 153 conciliatory article in Quarterly (1872), 162 joins cabinet (1874), 170 disagreement with D. on Public Worship Regulation Bill, 171 on 1876 Education Bill, 175 criticism of D.'s Near Eastern policy, 181 attends Constantinople conference, 186 prepares Berlin Congress, 191 D. prefers him as successor, 209 San Stefano, Treaty of, 191 Sandon, Viscount, later 3rd Earl of Harrowby, 168, 174-5 Scott, Sir Walter, 6 Selina, Countess of Bradford, see Bradford, Countess of Shaftesbury, 7th Earl of, Lord Ashley (q.v.), 174, 186 Sheffield, by-election (1880), 202 Sheil, R.L., 31 Shelburne, 2nd Earl of, 44

244

Index

Shrewsbury (D. as member for), 39-40, 43, 49, 54, 58, 71, 162 Shuvalov, Count, 189, 190 Smith, Paul, 216, 217 Smith, W.H., 164, 168, 174, 205 Smythe, George, 46-50, 54, 58, 62, 127, 207 Southey, Robert, 4 Spofforth, Markham, 133, 211 Staël, Mme de, x Stanley, Edward, from 1844 Lord Stanley, from 1851 14th Earl of Derby (q.v.), 17-18, 79, 84, 88, 89 early hostility to D., 31, 41-2 resigns (1845), 62 emerges as Protectionist leader, 71 and Jewish disabilities, 74 asks D. to sum up 1848 session, 75 and D.'s leadership, 76-7 rebukes D. over attempts to drop protection, 81 the Derby-Dizzy partnership assessed, 82 fails to form government (1851), 86-7 Stanley, Edward Henry, from 1869 15th Earl of Derby (q.v.), 86, 95, 98, 99, 102, 115, 118, 123, 132, 134, 138, 153 friendship with D., 86, 101, 124 D. talks to him about Zionism, 89 under secretary at foreign office, 91 and The Press, 97 shares D.'s unpopularity in party, 104 on D.'s relations with his father, 109, 120 distances himself from D., 110 colonial secretary, 112 Indian secretary, 114 as possible prime minister, 130, 132 as foreign secretary (1866), 133, 135 Stanley, Henry, 31 Stansfeld, James, 122, 123 Suez Canal, 178, 180 Sybil, xi, 14, 24, 37, 55, 58, 61, 69, 111, 160

Sykes, Lady Henrietta, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 26, 29 Tait, Archibald, Archbishop of Canterbury, 148, 170-1 Tamworth Manifesto, 22, 24, 37 Tancred, ix, xi, 6, 59, 69-71, 73, 88, 190 Taunton (D. as candidate, 1835), 21, 22, 25 Taylor, Colonel I.E., 99, 117, 147, 158 Thistlethwaite, Mrs., 186 Thompson, Colonel Perronet, 27 Times, The, 6, 25, 42, 59, 65, 101, 107, 132, 165, 213, 215 Tory Democracy, 141, 156, 212, 213, 214 Trollope, Anthony, 186 Turner, Sharon, 18 Venetia, 38 Victoria, Queen, 1, 27, 40, 44, 68, 74, 75, 79, 87, 106, 120, 123, 133, 148, 179, 185, 186, 190, 191, 193, 194, 199, 203, 205, 206, 209, 213 relations with D., 68, 87, 101, 113, 126-7, 144, 169, 177, 206 erratic behaviour, 144, 178 Empress of India, 175, 177-8 on Eastern question, 188-9 Vindication of the English Constitution, 23-4, 25 Vitzthum, Count, 127 Vivian Grey, 6-8, 9, 12, 26 Wales, Prince of, Edward VII, 127, 144, 158, 169, 212 Walpole, Spencer, 116, 122, 138 Wellington, 1st Duke of, 8, 18 White, William, 153 Whitley, Edward, 190, 202 Wilberforce, Samuel, 125, 144, 148 Wolff, Sir Henry Drummond, 208, 213 Wolseley, Sir Garnet, 199 Young, G.F., 81 Young Duke, The, 9, 15