After this excitement, Disraeli and Derby patiently steered their India Bill through parliament. They had seen off the two ‘Artful Dodgers’, Palmerston and Russell, who had looked as if they would bury their differences and unite to bring down the government as soon as an opportunity arose.62 Disraeli wrote to Sarah Brydges Willyams, an elderly friend and later benefactor, of his relief and pleasure at the passing of the danger. He and Derby already had experience of short-lived power; their minority administration of 1852 had been even more precarious than this one, falling after only a few months.63 Now, as he told Mrs Brydges Willyams, ‘the country is with us’. Not only was his April 1858 budget a ‘complete success’, as he boasted to the queen at the time,64 but he and Derby had survived a very close call over India. ‘Never was a party in such a humiliating plight, as the great Whig Coalition’, he exulted, one ‘that was to have devoured Her Majesty’s Government, as an ogre does a child.’65
As well as the public, a large part of the press supported the Derby–Disraeli government, with many commentators expressing surprise both at the unexpected co-operation between the aristocrat, the fourteenth of his noble line, and the parvenu, and at their success in pushing through a number of important reforms despite their precarious position. Though Disraeli was often ridiculed for his flamboyance in dress, manner, and speech, his hard work and cleverness won him praise, especially for guiding the India Bill to completion, for his widely acclaimed budget, and for his swift management of the bill to clean up the Thames. In July 1858 the monthly literary journal Bentley’s Miscellany compared Disraeli favourably to his predecessor, the Whig George Cornewall Lewis, ‘whose soporific periods emptied the House of all who were not too sleepy to rise’. It praised ‘Mr Disraeli, the writer, the eloquent debater, the thorough man of business, whose genius, courage, sagacity, and aptitude have placed him in the foremost rank of modern politicians’.66
His speeches were certainly the opposite of soporific. In the speech of 26 May to the Conservative electors of Slough in his constituency, in addition to dramatically retelling the story of the collapse of the Cardwell censure motion, he replied with relish to the toast to ‘Her Majesty’s Ministers’ by going on the attack against the opposition. He told the audience, to cheers and laughter, that his government, on coming into power after the unexpected fall of Palmerston’s ministry in February, had been told that they ‘were a weak government, and had done nothing’. ‘Why, they had vindicated the honour of England – they had preserved peace’; they had made up ‘an immense deficiency in the finances, and reduced taxation’. They had ‘laid down principles for the reconstruction of the Indian Empire which England approved, which Europe admired, and which, if acted upon’, would enhance ‘the greatness and glory of their country’. All this had been achieved in three short months and against an unscrupulous opposition, for there existed ‘at this moment that which has not existed in England since the days of Charles II’, namely ‘a cabal which has no other object but to upset the Government of the Queen, and to obtain its own ends in a manner the most reckless but the most determined’.67 Disraeli here rehearsed the ill-fated ‘Cambridge House Plot’ which only a week earlier he and Derby had feared would force their resignation.
So outrageous were his claims that the opposition – foolishly – took the matter up in parliament. On 30 May Lord John Russell told the House of Commons that the country was by no means in a poor state when Derby took over, and the following day Lord Palmerston attacked the government as ‘factious’. Disraeli outperformed both these formidable speakers. He concentrated on Palmerston’s objection to his making his claims in a public speech. ‘The noble Lord is quite horrified that I should have spoken in a booth on matters of State policy.’ Did Palmerston think that his own way of doing parliamentary business over a drink at his club was more appropriate? That ‘special announcements on matters of State … should be at a carousel in a club-room … in what is styled (though not by me) an inebriated assembly’?68 In the House of Lords on 31 May Lord Clarendon announced that he intended to bring up the Slough speech in the house the following day, with particular reference to remarks made about himself when he had been in office. Lord Derby’s reply shows that he could learn impudence from his irrepressible colleague; he raised a laugh by thanking Lord Clarendon for giving notice of his intention, ‘for I shall have an opportunity of reading before to-morrow evening my right hon. friend’s speech’.69 When the matter was discussed on 1 June Derby declared Disraeli’s Slough speech to be amusing and entertaining, and truthful too. It simply brought back to him ‘the matchless scene’ in parliament on the day the motion of censure collapsed, a scene which he would remember till the last day of his life.70
In the ongoing tug of war between the two best parliamentary insulters, Disraeli and Palmerston, Disraeli won this battle. He had learned how to turn Palmerston’s haughty put-downs back on to him. When Palmerston accused him of vaunting ambition and hypocrisy, Disraeli proved that these adjectives fitted his older, more experienced, aristocratic opponent like a glove.71 A reluctantly admiring Lord John Russell told the American visitor John Motley at a breakfast party on Tuesday, 1 June that at Slough Disraeli had ‘delivered to the farmers and graziers and gentlemen there assembled one of the cleverest, wittiest, most mendacious, most audacious, most besotted speeches that was ever made’.72
Disraeli’s success as a politician came to him relatively late. Up to now he had been better known as the author of striking, rhetorically ornate novels, including Sybil, or the Two Nations, published in 1845 as a rallying cry for the ‘Young England’ movement with which he was associated, a call for a re-energised Toryism which would attempt to resolve the problems of poverty and working-class despair associated with rapid industrialisation. In the novel the author steps out from the story on several occasions to give his view of the state of the nation and the inadequacy of the day’s Tory government, led by Sir Robert Peel. Disraeli was himself a Tory MP at the time, but opposed Peel, whom he would help to bring down the following year, partly out of pique at not having been given a government post. In Sybil, as in his parliamentary speeches, he turned disloyalty to his leader into a bold claim on the moral high ground of a better, more compassionate conservatism. An example comes in the middle of the novel:
In a parliamentary sense, that great party [the Tory party] has ceased to exist; but I will believe it still lives in the thought and sentiment and consecrated memory of the English nation. It has its origin in great principles and in noble instincts; it sympathises with the lowly, it looks up to the Most High … Even now it is not dead, but sleepeth; and in an age of political materialism, of confused purposes and perplexed intelligence, that aspires only to wealth because it has faith in no other accomplishment, as men rifle cargoes on the verge of a shipwreck, Toryism will yet rise from the tomb … to bring back strength to the Crown, liberty to the Subject, and to announce that power has only one duty – to secure the social welfare of the people.73
His speeches in the House of Commons were like this too. Yet, divisive and risk-taking though he was, he gained both power and respect during the early summer of 1858, his first real chance to flourish as a minister and to show the qualities which would eventually see him become a successful prime minister in 1868, aged sixty-three. Like Dickens, he dazzled with his verbal energy, his ambition and determination. Like Dickens, as a young man he dressed in dandyish clothes, wore his curly hair long, and exuded a confidence which disguised an unpromising background. Like Dickens, he did not go to university; though more securely middle class than Dickens – who suffered from the ignominy of his father’s short stay in debtor’s prison when he was a child – Disraeli, the son of the respected scholar Isaac D’Israeli, faced casual as well as vituperative anti-Semitism, such as Punch’s frequent representation of him as Fagin.74 While it allowed him to become an MP, the fact that he had been baptised into the Church of England as a teenager (his father having been advised by non-Jewish friends to
baptise his children in order to spare them discrimination) was no security against ad hominem attacks.
Disraeli’s response to his Jewishness was to claim, falsely, an exotic and romantic family history of Sephardic aristocracy, and to introduce in his novels the Jewish character Sidonia, an idealistic, if sarcastic, creation modelled on his author. At the same time, he took every opportunity to praise true English aristocracy; like Carlyle in his hugely influential study of the ills of contemporary society, Past and Present (1843), Disraeli idealised the medieval past for the benevolent patriarchy of the upper class.
Not only was Disraeli – unlike Derby (or Palmerston, or Lord John Russell) – not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he had to fight hard to gain entrance to public life. It took him many attempts during the 1830s to get into parliament. He succeeded in 1837 through the patronage of the ageing roué Lord Lyndhurst and the woman they shared, Lady Henrietta Sykes. He took risks, such as lying in parliament when he knew he might be found out, telling the House of Commons in a debate in May 1846 that he, Disraeli, had never asked Peel for a job, when Peel had a letter from him written in 1841 doing exactly that. Peel was too gentlemanly to expose his adversary and colleague, and Disraeli got away with it. Equally daringly, he lived in a constant state of debt, despite marrying in 1839 a wealthy widow twelve years his senior, who paid off those debts he chose to tell her about. Disraeli was always on the edge of disaster, on the verge of being found out. Since 1848 he had owed £25,000 (well over £1 million in today’s money) to the family of Lord George Bentinck, with whom he was closely associated in parliament; it had helped pay for his great country house, Hughenden Manor. George’s elder brother called in the loan suddenly in June 1857, and Disraeli, not for the first or last time, resorted to moneylenders.75 He was known in certain circles to have enjoyed homosexual relationships, usually with young aristocrats; indeed, many of his novels contained risqué scenes and the semi-obscured vocabulary of homosexuality, with references to ‘Greek’ love, to Hyacinth, beloved of Apollo in Greek myth, to dandies and effeminate-looking boys. In the vital summer of 1858 he was called a sodomite repeatedly in the letters, private and printed, of Rosina Bulwer Lytton, his friend Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton’s estranged wife.76
While Dickens tried that summer, not altogether successfully, to protect his reputation as a respectable writer, social critic, husband, and father, Disraeli – just as much in the public eye as Dickens – continued to act recklessly with regard to money, which was still mysteriously lacking, despite his government position, his wife’s fortune, and repeated help from friends. As for his dandyism, like Dickens he had toned that down, though he still wore his hair in ringlets, and his wife Mary Anne regularly dyed it black for him.77 Still, he was not quite such a vision as that described by an American journalist who knew him in the 1830s. Nathaniel Parker Willis, having met Disraeli in various upper-class salons in London, told his reading public in 1852 about the ‘gorgeous gold flowers’ on the younger Disraeli’s ‘splendidly embroidered waistcoat’, his ‘patent leather pumps’, and ‘a quantity of chains about his neck’, all of which made him ‘rather a conspicuous object’:
He is lividly pale, and but for the energy of his action and the strength of his lungs, would seem a victim to consumption. His eye is black as Erebus, and has the most mocking and lying-in-wait sort of expression conceivable. His mouth is alive with a kind of working and impatient nervousness, and when he has burst forth, as he does constantly, with a particularly successful cataract of expression, it assumes a curl of triumphant scorn that would be worthy of a Mephistopheles.78
Descriptions of his exotic appearance in his twenties and thirties abound. He was seen wearing purple trousers with a scarlet waistcoat and white gloves with several rings worn on the outside, or he sported ‘fancy-pattern pantaloons’ with ‘glittering chains’ and a ‘dark bottle-green frock-coat’.79 In 1858 he was still known, by acquaintances and strangers alike, as a dandy and an attention-seeker. On 5 May 1858 the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev attended a dinner at the Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden, in aid of the Royal Literary Fund, which gave money to impoverished writers and their families. Turgenev described the occasion in an article in a Russian journal in January 1859. He wrote that while Lord Palmerston, who presided at the dinner, looked elegant and aristocratic, Disraeli (who was not at this dinner, but whom Turgenev saw elsewhere on the London circuit) looked like a ‘performer and popinjay’.80
Yet somehow, in spite of his Jewishness, his eccentricities, and the disreputable aspects of his career and private life, Disraeli managed to thrive in 1858. He arrived properly on the public stage, succeeded, against the odds, in persuading Lord Derby, Queen Victoria, and Prince Albert of his value, and worked harder than anyone to get important reforming legislation through two hostile Houses of Parliament.
Marriage mischief
One piece of legislation for which Disraeli was not responsible, and in which he had no personal interest, was the Divorce Act, which Palmerston’s government had pushed through the previous year and which was now being tested in suits brought before the new Divorce Court during the spring and early summer of 1858. Though he was not always a faithful husband, Disraeli was happily married to his Mary Anne, defending her against those who found her silly and vulgar, prone to indiscreet remarks. She was as flamboyant in her dress as he was; she wore pink satin and lots of diamonds at the age of nearly fifty, and was described by her friend Charlotte de Rothschild in the 1860s, when she was over seventy, as wearing a wig ‘adorned with sky blue velvet folds and gold butterflies’.81 In 1871, when she was almost seventy-nine, she appeared in ‘youthful muslins, profusely decorated with blue and yellow ribbons’, while Disraeli, himself now aged sixty-six, appeared in ‘a suit of pearl grey, a soft hat, a new set of teeth and a new collection of curls’.82 The Disraelis made a devoted couple.
Less devoted couples presented petitions for divorce in the new court from 16 January, but because the early cases brought under the new act were often continuations of petitions previously being heard in the now defunct Court of Arches, or required the judges to send them away to rethink their suit, and because it was agreed on all hands that the judges in the new court would be engaged initially in ‘setting principles and forming a practice’, as The Times put it on 12 January 1858, the first cases to be fully tried and decided under the new act did not reach their conclusions until May of that year.83 The three judges appointed to sit in the court were the improbably named Sir Cresswell Cresswell, a bachelor of sixty-four, cautious and occasionally irascible, but fair-minded and respected, who presided over the court until his death in 1863; Sir William Wightman, a married man of seventy-two; and the chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas, Sir Alexander Cockburn, the third-highest-ranked judge in England. He was fifty-five, a bachelor like Cresswell, but unlike his colleague he was well known as a limelight-loving socialite and was the father of two illegitimate children in their teens.84 It is not recorded that Cockburn felt embarrassment about deciding on the sexual morality of the individuals who came before the court, any more than did many of those MPs and peers with interesting private lives who had spoken loudly, at length, and in great heat in the divorce debates of the parliamentary session of 1857. Cresswell, on the other hand, was noted for his even-handedness towards women and for the seriousness with which he took his job; he called in a jury when he felt it necessary, and in his six years in the post oversaw more than a thousand cases in the Divorce Court in Westminster Hall.85
A landmark case was that of Tomkins v. Tomkins, which was decided on Tuesday, 4 May 1858. The suit was brought by the wife, who had to prove not only adultery, but also cruelty. Her husband, a potato salesman in Farringdon market, beat her, and also had a mistress. Lord Cresswell told the court that this was the first time he had sworn in a jury to hear the case with him. The jury found in favour of the wife and a judicial separation was granted. This was a fine example of the progressive nature of the new
act. Since the petitioner was both a woman and a member of the working class, she could only now under the new law hope to gain a divorce. The spectators in court seemed to recognise this; they burst into applause when the verdict was given.86 Suits now began to be granted in numbers. The newspapers reported on them, and most welcomed the speed and justice with which they were decided, whether brought by husbands or wives. The Manchester Times of Saturday, 15 May noted that most of the cases heard so far had been undefended and therefore speedily resolved, and that ‘already several injured wives have come forward to obtain the redress to which they were obviously entitled’.87
By the end of the year 244 cases had been heard, and the general opinion, at least as represented in newspapers of every political hue, was voiced early on that the new law was a roaring success.88 The lord chief justice, Lord Campbell, certainly thought so. The Era of Sunday, 16 May reported him stating, after the successful conclusion of eight cases in two days on 11 May, that these cases were evidence of the efficiency of the new law. Most had concerned people in a ‘humble station in life’, who would have stood no chance of gaining relief under the old expensive, lengthy system; the new act offered the same remedy to the poor as to the rich.89
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