Sons, Servants and Statesmen

by John Van der Kiste

  Each February, sovereign and Prime Minister exchanged valentines. ‘He wishes he could repose on a sunny bank, like young Valentine in the pretty picture that fell from a rosy cloud this morn,’ he wrote on receiving one such card, ‘but the reverie of the happy youth would be rather different from his. Valentine would dream of the future, and youthful loves, and all under the inspiration of a beautiful clime! Lord Beaconsfield, no longer in the sunset, but the twilight of his existence, must encounter a life of anxiety and toil; but this, too, has its romance, when he remembers that he labours for the most gracious of beings!’10 Some years later she told Lord Rosebery how touched she had been when Disraeli sent her a small trinket box, a heart transfixed by an arrow on one side, and the single word Fideliter on the other.

  Queen Victoria’s platonic relationship with Disraeli never had any effect on her association with her Highland servant John Brown (see chapter 7). On the contrary, it was as if she had the best of both worlds. Her Prime Minister brought the poetical romance into her life, while the other made her feel secure at home. Between them they gave her all the moral support and attention she needed. One made her feel like a helpless widow, relying on him for protection, while the other made her feel like some desirable and almost mythical creature – an undoubted Queen.

  Though they may not have realised it, Disraeli and Brown played complementary roles in drawing Queen Victoria out of her intense mourning for the Prince Consort. Although the passing of the years contributed, by the 1870s she was becoming less self-pitying and spent less time obsessively thinking about him, bewailing her loss. With these two very different men, her health, spirits and zest for life improved. Those who saw her exchanging banter with Disraeli during their regular audiences, or dancing with Brown at the ghillies’ balls at Balmoral, were proof enough that ‘the widow of Windsor’ had recovered her natural vitality. The Hanoverian high spirits were triumphing once more over Coburg melancholy.

  Disraeli was never remotely jealous of her relationship with John Brown; he knew that the Scotsman’s presence did her good, and that she could divide her attentions, even her affections, between the two men. He understood how important the Highland servant was to her well-being, grateful that he had brought her out of her morbid frame of mind and her obsession with the memory of the Prince Consort. Maybe the Prime Minister had heightened her interest in life, but Brown had been the first to reawaken it. Unlike most other members of her circle, not least her family, Disraeli treated Brown with courtesy, and this only increased her admiration for this most understanding of prime ministers.

  In foreign policy, the Queen and her Prime Minister were equally at one, not least on the question of the enhancement of British prestige. For too long, argued the Queen, people like Gladstone had allowed Britain to play a submissive, even negative, role, whereas Disraeli was ready to make a stand on behalf of British power in Europe.

  Nevertheless, it was further eastwards that he achieved his most conspicuous feats. Monarch and Prime Minister were both well aware that if the Suez Canal was to come totally under French control, British commercial interests between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea would be at risk, as the waterway provided the shortest route between Britain and India, and over three-quarters of the ships using the canal were British. In November 1875 the Khedive of Egypt decided to sell his shares in the Canal, of which he owned nearly half, and he offered them to a French syndicate. Their acquisition would therefore have placed the Canal entirely in French hands.

  Disraeli knew that the British government must buy the shares, and must do so quickly. Having rallied an unenthusiastic Cabinet behind him, he borrowed £4 million from the Rothschild banking house, and in November 1875 purchased the shares on behalf of the British government. ‘It is just settled,’ he wrote to the Queen in triumph; ‘you have it, Madam. The French government has been out-generaled.’11 Though it could hardly be considered as a gift from the Prime Minister to his sovereign, she was spellbound by this theatrical way and the myth that he had in effect presented his sovereign with this great waterway linking Britain to India, the Mother Country to its Empire, West to East. There could be no more striking proof of her country’s greatness.

  The next imperial gift to the Queen, in a manner of speaking, was an imperial crown. Disraeli’s tactics in this sphere were aimed at satisfying two objectives: a satisfactory culmination of Victoria’s intense interest in the Indian sub-continent of India, and also solving the age-old question of whether the title of Empress was superior to that of Queen.

  None of Britain’s overseas territories across the seas fascinated Queen Victoria more than India. The populations of Canada, Australia and New Zealand were basically Englishmen enjoying self-government, but the Indians were a subject people whom she saw as belonging in a sense to her personally. She felt a close affinity with India and regarded herself as being directly responsible for the country and its people’s welfare.

  Disraeli, who had once been considered as a possible Viceroy of India, agreed with her wholeheartedly. He too saw the land as his sovereign’s personal domain and thought it would benefit everyone if British rule could be represented more directly by the monarch. The Prince of Wales had also long wanted to visit India, and knowing that his mother had a habit of thwarting him in any public role he was keen to assume, he took care to enlist Disraeli’s approval for the idea.

  An Indian royal tour accorded precisely with Disraeli’s grand design. As expected, the Queen was less enthusiastic, and it took all his diplomatic skills to obtain her consent. She questioned the cost, wondered whether Princess Alexandra should accompany her husband or not (though to Alix’s lasting dismay, Bertie would not let her join him), wondered also about the personal characters of the Prince’s intended travelling company, and not least about the likelihood of the notoriously unfaithful socialite Prince getting into trouble. Nevertheless, the tour fulfilled everyone’s expectations, the heir carrying out a demanding schedule of appearances and functions with his usual enthusiasm. To the Indians he was not a representative of the British government but a living symbol of the monarchy, and there could have been no better proof of the fact that the Queen was as much the sovereign of India as she was of Great Britain.

  Inevitably, this reinforced her aspirations to assuming the title of Empress of India, a title which sounded infinitely superior to Queen. Every major European monarchy, such as Russia, Germany and Austria, was an empire, as was France until the fall of Napoleon III in 1870. ‘Empress Victoria’ would therefore consign to history the European concept that its archdukes, grand dukes and crown princes were superior to mere princes.

  Disraeli’s plans complemented the Queen’s wishes, and, as Prime Minister, it was up to him to see that the scheme was put into action. There were sound political reasons for the introduction of the Royal Titles Bill, beyond the matter of personal, or even national, vanity. Such a title would confer an aura of stability and permanence on British rule in India. A British Empress of India might make Tsar Alexander II of Russia less inclined to advance further into Asia, as Queen Victoria could now face him as an undisputed equal across the North-West Frontier. If the Prince of Wales’s tour had struck the first blow for British prestige in India, the Queen’s assumption of the title of Empress would strike the second.

  On 1 May 1876 the Royal Titles Bill was passed, and a delighted Queen Victoria was declared Queen–Empress. Though she was imperial only as far as India was concerned, she enthusiastically signed herself ‘VR & I’ (Victoria Regina et Imperatrix) whenever possible. In recognition of his work, Disraeli was given a huge portrait of his sovereign, itself a copy of a painting by Heinrich von Angeli.

  Well aware of Disraeli’s advancing years, the Queen was increasingly anxious about his health. She would chide him if he visited her when he had a cold and once, when they both had colds, he claimed that ‘the kingdom was never governed with such an amount of catarrh and sneezing’. It amused her when he wrote to Ponsonby, claiming t
o have recovered his youth by doing what the doctor had warned him against – drinking very good wine.

  In the summer of 1876 he was seventy-one and feared his health might be unequal to much more exertion in the House of Commons. He told the Queen that he must either resign – something she would not countenance – or continue his premiership from the House of Lords. This gave her the chance to present him with a title, as he had only recently conferred one on her himself, and that summer she elevated him to the peerage as the Earl of Beaconsfield. On 11 August 1876 he delivered his last speech in the House of Commons, and thereafter he remained Prime Minister from the House of Lords. It was thus as Earl of Beaconsfield that he gave his blessing to the Queen’s official assumption of her title on 1 January 1877. At noon that day in Delhi, Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India by the Viceroy, Lord Lytton. The occasion was celebrated that evening at Windsor with a sumptuous banquet at which, proudly sporting her Indian jewellery, the Queen heard the Earl make such a lively address that it might have been taken straight from one of his novels.

  During Disraeli’s first premiership, in 1868, the Queen had sent him bouquets of flowers. Accompanying one such gift from Windsor was a letter from Princess Helena to Mary Anne Disraeli. Her mother, the Princess wrote, ‘heard him say one day that he was so fond of May and all those lovely spring flowers that she has ventured to send him these, as they will make his rooms look so bright’.12

  In his second term of office he reciprocated this practice, choosing though to send her not exotic blooms like lilies or orchids, but spring plants such as snowdrops and primroses. Each time she sent him another offering, she was rewarded with one of his lyrical letters. In time, his ardent imagination had converted the dowdy and dumpy sovereign into something altogether more poetic. Like Edmund Spenser’s Elizabeth I, he told her, she was a ‘Faery Queen’, her flowers an offering from the fauns and dryads of the woods of Osborne; and camellias, blooming in the natural air, became ‘your Majesty’s Faery Isle’. Primroses meant that ‘your Majesty’s sceptre has touched the enchanted isle’.

  When she sent him snowdrops, he fastened them to his breast to prove to his generally bemedalled fellow guests at an official banquet that he had also been decorated by a gracious sovereign. ‘Then, in the middle of the night,’ he told her, it occurred to him that it might all be enchantment, ‘and that perhaps it was a Faery gift and came from another monarch: Queen Titania, gathering flowers, with her Court, in a soft and sea-girt isle, and sending magic blossoms, which, they say, turn the heads of those who receive them.’13 Some might have viewed the Victoria–Disraeli association merely in terms of a wily and accomplished old seducer toadying to a plain and susceptible widow. But in both appearance and manner, Disraeli was a combination of all those men to whom she was always attracted. He had become her mentor, her counsellor, her best friend, maybe even lover in a strictly platonic sense, embodying the nonchalant cynicism of Lord Melbourne, the solicitude of Prince Albert and the ‘take me as I am’ spirit of John Brown. Yet there were limits to his powers of persuasion, and even he had no more success than her Liberal prime ministers when it came to asking her to open parliament.

  Sometimes she could betray her irritation with him, especially if she felt he and her dinner guests were raising the conversation above her intellectual norm – something which had brought out a latent sense of inferiority in her relations with Albert. In 1876 he was dining at Windsor with the Queen and the German Empress Augusta, who had been renowned since her youth for being something of a bluestocking. The Empress, he noted afterwards, was becoming ‘involved in some metaphysical speculation’ with another guest, and later he was himself spellbound by her, ‘who threw out all her resources, philosophical, poetic, political – till the Faery was a little jealous, for she had originally told Lady Ely that some one “was not to make his pretty speeches to Augoosta, who only wanted to draw him to her!!!!”’14

  In 1878 Disraeli was partly responsible for another British triumph, namely the Congress of Berlin. During the previous year, Russia had declared war on Turkey, having a vested interest in seeing the Turkish Empire dismantled, while to Britain it was a safeguard against Russian designs on India. To surrender any Turkish territory to the Russians could threaten land and sea routes to India.

  Some thought that Disraeli instigated, if not actively encouraged, her detestation of Gladstone. He had every reason to stimulate her antipathy towards his great rival, as the more she hated Gladstone, the more she would support Disraeli’s anti-Russian policies. She was outraged at Russia’s declaration of war against Turkey, and even more so at successive Russian victories. If she were a man, she proclaimed, she would like to go and give those horrid Russians ‘such a beating’.15

  Disraeli refused to pay too much attention to reports of mistreatment of Christian subjects by their Turkish masters. Reports reaching London of Bulgarian peasants being murdered by Turkish troops he dismissed as ‘coffee-house babble’. Gladstone, then leader of the opposition, fulminated against the Turks in his pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, a document which Disraeli denounced as ‘contemptible’ and ‘the product of an unprincipled maniac’. Pragmatically he refrained from declaring war, somewhat to the dismay of his sovereign, who wanted him to act more assertively, urging him to tell Russia that Britain was resolved to declare war if she reached, and refused to quit, Constantinople.

  While he was almost as Russophobe himself, Disraeli preferred to be in a position to threaten Russia with war if she showed any signs of occupying Constantinople. Having worked the Queen up into a belligerent frame of mind, he played on this to bring his divided cabinet round to a more warlike attitude, while relying upon their ambivalent attitude to help restrain her from calling on them to carry out her desire to give the Russians ‘a beating’.

  Victoria was not the only bellicose member of her family. At a dinner party Disraeli found himself seated next to the Duchess of Teck, who asked him why he had not declared war. ‘What are you waiting for, Mr Disraeli? The Queen is for you: the Army’s for you – what are you waiting for?’ Unabashed, he answered, ‘The potatoes, Ma’am.’16 Had some of his Cabinet colleagues had their own way, nobody would have waited. In particular, Disraeli’s Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury, represented those who had the utmost sympathy with the Christian subjects of the Turkish Empire in Europe and who regarded Russia as their protector. Salisbury, Disraeli complained to the Queen, apparently thought ‘that the progress of Russia is the progress of religion & civilisation’.17

  Britain remained neutral throughout the nine-month conflict. An armistice between Russia and Turkey was signed in January 1878, but rumours that Russia had ignored the terms of the armistice and was marching on Constantinople finally enabled Disraeli to stir his irresolute Cabinet into action. War credits were passed, arrangements were made to move troops from India to the Mediterranean and reserve forces were called up. This was what he had always foreseen and hoped for, and for him it would suffice. While he had no intention of being stampeded into war, it would surely convince Russia of Britain’s determination to stand firm. He had judged correctly, for the arrival of the British fleet off Constantinople halted the Russians. Hastily imposing the Treaty of San Stefano on the retreating Turks, Russia concluded the war.

  The Queen and her government were not satisfied with some of the treaty’s provisions, and Russia was persuaded to agree to a conference of the Great Powers, to be staged in Berlin under the presidency of Bismarck. It opened in June 1878, and Disraeli, it was said (by himself as well as others), returned from it having achieved ‘peace with honour’. A more sober assessment later prevailed. He was ill-equipped to represent Britain on his own at such an event. His knowledge of geography was extremely vague, and he admitted that it held little interest for him; his meagre command of foreign languages extended only to rather poor French, or ‘grocer’s French’, as it was described; and his memory was beginning to fail him. Before leavin
g England, he told the Queen that he would attend the Congress, ‘exhibit his full powers’ and then leave the better-qualified Lord Salisbury to complete the details. Nevertheless, what he lacked in basic administrative qualities he made up for in his sense of history, the lessons of the past and their implications for the future for Europe, and above all in his diplomatic instincts, which sprang from a remarkable understanding of human nature.

  The Treaty of Berlin was signed on 13 July. Some of Disraeli’s Cabinet and supporters were disappointed that Russia had not been humiliated, and thought Turkey had been shabbily treated, while the annexation of Cyprus smacked of the imperialism so derided by the Liberals. But the delighted Queen sent him a huge bouquet of ‘Windsor Flowers’ on his return to Downing Street, as well as offering him the Garter, a dukedom and a peerage for his brother or his nephew. Rather than ‘Peace with Honour’, quipped one cynic, it was ‘Peace with Honours’.

  In fact, of all the honours he could have had, Disraeli was content to accept only the Garter. ‘He will not trust himself now in endeavouring to express what he feels to your Majesty’s kindness,’ he wrote. ‘He thinks he is ennobled through your Majesty’s goodness quite enough, though with infinite deference to your Majesty’s gracious pleasure, he would presume to receive the Garter; but, as he always feels, your Majesty’s kind thoughts are dearer to him than any personal distinction, however rich and rare. The belief that your Majesty trusts, and approves of him is more precious than rubies!’18