by Simon Schama
Was a baptized Jew leading the party of the country gentry and the Church of England less amazing than a baptized Jew who was also a romantic novelist, the author of Tancred? But that, of course, was precisely Disraeli’s major qualification. As a youthful member of the dissident Tory group known as Young England, and then much later in the preface to the 1870 edition of his novels, Disraeli wrote of the necessity of ‘imagination’ in British government, a quality he insisted was no less important than ‘reason’. ‘Imagination’ only made sense, though, when defined negatively. It was against utilitarianism, the vision of human society as a sense-receptor machine; against commercial and industrial materialism; against the individualism at the core of free-trade liberalism; against the monotonous ‘levelling’ of egalitarianism; against the relentless campaign of moral and civic self-improvement that the High Minds of liberalism were always talking about. Disraeli started nothing; but he tapped into a rich and stubborn vein of sentiment in British life that was shared to a strong extent by Queen Victoria. Instead of all the above, it valued historical memory, the textured sensibility of the past, and wanted to recycle some of it for the future – in the look of Gothic revival churches and in the preservation and embellishment of ceremony and ritual. It idealized country life and the old manorial relations between squire and tenant that were rapidly evaporating before the pressures of world markets; it honoured the craft workshop and the college choir. Disraeli’s way had been prepared for him by the romantic rhetoric of Edmund Burke; the massive popularity of the novels of Sir Walter Scott; the nostalgic ‘troubadour’ history paintings like Paul Delaroche’s Lady Jane Grey; Pugin’s mind-bogglingly profuse interior for the House of Lords; the neo-chivalric canvases of the Pre-Raphaelites; the Christian paternalism of the old Poet Laureate Wordsworth and the Arthurian idylls of the present incumbent, Tennyson. Disraeli was Carlyle with a smile; Charles Dickens with a white silk handkerchief.
It was telling that Disraeli had made his name in the 1840s as MP for Shrewsbury by taking down the cotton-manufacturer prime minister Sir Robert Peel. Peel’s assumption was that the Tory party’s future hinged on slipstreaming itself behind Britain’s laissez-faire internationalist industrialism. The ferocity of Disraeli’s attack implied something like the opposite – that the real future of the party lay not in making itself indistinguishable from Whiggishness or liberalism but in keeping faith with precisely the opposite set of values – crown, church, country (to which he would later add empire). Young England’s stance was to make the Tory leaders uneasy at being so apologetic about the institutions of which Disraeli insisted they should be boasting; not least the insular interests of Britain itself. Young England was meant to be the kiss of life for Olde England.
What seemed at the beginning to be a stance of quixotic futility turned out to be a strategy of genius; massive social self-denial turned into political paydirt. It was a theory of political action that confounded almost every other theory of 19th-century progress – not just Mill and Macaulay but Marx. Who could have imagined that, as the franchise gradually became extended, the working class whom it embraced would become interested less in political egalitarianism and more in social improvement; that they would want, not political union with their self-designated emancipators among the Liberals but cleaner water, less noisome slums (mistakenly ridiculed by Gladstone as ‘the politics of sewage’) and ra-ra British imperialism? Disraeli, however, claimed to have known this all along when, as leader of the House of Commons, he pushed through the Second Reform Act in 1867, trumping the Liberals at their own game. The working class, once admitted to the vote, he said, would not be a Trojan horse for revolution but on the contrary were Conservative in the ‘purest and loftiest’ sense, in that they were ‘proud of belonging to a great country and wish to maintain its greatness – that they are proud of belonging to an Imperial country, and are resolved to maintain, if they can, their empire – that they believe on the whole that the greatness and the empire of England are to be attributed to the ancient institutions of the land’.
Cynical or not, there was at least a grain of truth in Disraeli’s intuition that when the queen protested at being addressed like a public meeting by Mr Gladstone she was voicing the irritation of millions of her subjects – from farmers to publicans. The Liberal religion, perfectly personified by Gladstone, demanded that Britons should every day do better, try harder and live more purely. But not everyone wanted to prowl the streets looking for fallen women to save; not everyone had it in them to be up and doing every blessed waking hour of the day. How the two giants of Victorian politics spent their own leisure hours says a great deal about the contrast of their personalities. When he allowed himself time off from the dispatch boxes or from translating Homer, Gladstone rolled up his sleeves and chopped down trees at his estate at Hawarden in Flintshire. A collection of his axes still exists in his ‘temple of peace’ library at Hawarden. Disraeli, on the other hand, rose at a reasonable seven-thirty in the morning, would read the newspapers and do a little government business; then he might stroll along the terrace amidst his peacocks (the perfect Disraelian bird) and peruse a few more documents between daydreams in the library, where ‘I like to watch the sunbeams on the bindings of the books’. For Gladstone, the binding was just something that held together what mattered – the contents.
Disraeli’s scepticism about the moral imperatives of policy did not in any way make him politically lazy. In the run-up to the election of 1874, in which Gladstone defended the record of his own reformist government, Disraeli took the fight right to the heart of the enemy. His pronouncements about the working class’s enthusiasm for the traditions of church, crown and empire, and their preference for social improvement over political equality – in effect the survival charter of modern Toryism – were deliberately made through rousing speeches in the temples of liberalism: the Free Trade Hall in Manchester and the Crystal Palace in London. Buildings that had long been associated with the ethos of an internationalist peace-loving scripture of harmony between peoples, the morality of entrepreneurial striving, were now reconsecrated by Disraeli’s rhetoric into bastions of British self-assertion. The election that followed vindicated all of Disraeli’s optimism, giving the Conservatives a huge majority of 110 seats in England alone. The government then proceeded to deliver on some, at least, of its promises. The home secretary, Richard Cross, hitherto a complete unknown in government, introduced a batch of reforms that measurably and concretely improved the life of the urban working class – better regulation of food and drugs; cleaner water through legislation on river pollution; the first slum-clearance legislation (on which, however, few local authorities acted); expanded legality for trade-union action.
After the bread, the circus. For Disraeli was equally (if not more) committed to feeding the people’s ‘imagination’ as their bellies; and he knew that the restoration of public spectacle had to start at the top, with the monarchy. His elaborate, daring and shameless wooing of the reclusive queen – begun in earnest when he had become prime minister for the first time in 1868 – was part of a long strategy to secure the future of the monarchy by persuading it to re-emerge from the thick cocoon of grief in which Victoria had wrapped it. The timing, Disraeli thought, was urgent, since republicanism – at the high-water mark of its popularity in the late 1860s and early 1870s – fed on the notorious absenteeism of the monarch. Why bother with a queen who seemed not to want to be bothered by the office herself? But Disraeli’s success in charming Victoria out of her seclusion only worked because he was genuinely touched by the increasingly odd, emotionally tormented, obstreperous, stout little matriarch. The gallantry may have been a ploy, but it was turned on with deep and genuine warmth and affection. ‘He is very peculiar … but very clever and sensible,’ Victoria wrote after an early meeting. And before long Disraeli’s huge gamble at maintaining an easy-going mixture of chivalric devotion and brazen informality worked wonders, surely because it brought back girlish memories of Lord Melb
ourne, who had died in 1848. Like Melbourne, Disraeli wrote Victoria lengthy, often whimsical and gossipy letters about the doings (and follies) of politicians. Like Melbourne, he encouraged her to take a strongly (in fact unrealistically) assertive view of her constitutional prerogatives. This last was deeply disingenuous, since Disraeli had strongly disapproved of what he felt had been Prince Albert’s ambition to tilt government in Britain towards a court-influenced style of administration, so much so that, according to Lord Stanley, he thought the Prince Consort’s death would be the ‘start of a new reign’. That he could persuade the queen that he was promoting her dear departed’s way of doing things while actually doing the opposite was the mark of his dexterity. And she rewarded Disraeli with extraordinary familiarity. He could sit in her presence, rib her with mild, twinkle-eyed banter. In February 1866, Victoria opened parliament in person for the first time since Albert’s death, nearly five years earlier in 1861. But she did so sulkily, grumbling about the chore and flatly refusing to wear ceremonial robes. But with a prime minister she trusted absolutely, Victoria was prepared to expose herself (up to a point) to the public gaze. Just as Disraeli had steered his party towards a new identity for the modern age, so he did with the monarchy, becoming the impresario of its public re-emergence.
Imperial spectacle was a vital element in all this. Although she was grudgingly dutiful as queen, the prospect of becoming empress whetted Victoria’s appetite for grandeur. When in 1876, Disraeli, with the help of the Rothschilds, pulled off the huge coup of buying the Khedive of Egypt’s shares in the Suez Canal (and with it control of European access to India), he transformed the strategic and economic prospects of the British Raj. But the hidden wiring of that power had to be accompanied by the display of majesty. The same psychology that informed Disraeli’s conviction that the mass of the people of Britain wanted to have good done to them, rather than be urged to endless exercises in moral self-improvement, fitted well with the paternalistic temper in the post-Mutiny government of India. Canning’s successor as viceroy, Lord Elgin, had unblushingly and cynically insisted that ‘all orientals are children, amused and gratified by external trappings and ceremonies and titles and ready to put up with the loss of real dignity if only they are permitted to enjoy the semblance of it’.
Ever since Canning’s progresses up-country, viceroys had been assiduous in holding local durbars, or audiences, at which they bestowed the ‘semblances’ of Victorian dignity on local Indian princes. The policy was the exact antithesis of Dalhousie’s brutal ‘lapse’ annexationism: the tropical projection of Disraeli-ite neo-feudalism, with the Gaekwar of Baroda or the rajah of Jaipur standing in for the bauble-heavy landed aristocracy of Caithness and Cambridgeshire. Under the Mughals, durbars had been a ritual by which local governors made a personal formalized submission to the emperor in return for which they were brought within the embrace of his personal aura – symbolized by the ‘exchanging of gifts and bestowal of titles and official appointments’. But the British, with their much more instrumental view of ceremony, turned the durbars into the kind of ritual they understood and were good at: demonstrations of pecking order, with the good boys pushed up the ranking and the bad boys demoted or ignored; together with the award of trinkets – medals, ribbons, insignia. Compared to the personal touch of the Mughal ceremonies, the British version was brassy, garish and remote. But, backed as it was by the unarguable power of the sword (prudently adjusted since the Mutiny so that the ratio of Indian to British troops was four to one instead of six to one), it worked. The maharajahs lined up to get their gongs.
Although it was out of the question for Victoria herself to attend a durbar, she was quite happy for her children to go to India to spread the regal aura. Alfred (Affie), the Duke of Edinburgh, did the tour in 1869 (tigers, maharajahs, polo, heavily crenellated railway stations). In 1876 it was Bertie, the Prince of Wales’s turn, the trip (all of the above plus huge, military brass bands, a custom-made silver howdah for his elephant and parades of loyal turbans) orchestrated to coincide with the announcement of a change in Victoria’s style. Henceforth, in addition to being queen she would be the empress of all India – Kaiser-i-Hind. The title had been dreamed up by the Hungarian-born Professor of Oriental Languages at the Punjab University College at Lahore, G.W. Leitner, a believer in the ‘Indo-Aryan’ linguistic trunk from which European and Asian languages had (alas) separately branched. To the sceptical, ‘Kaiser-i-Hind’ sounded like the purest operetta, but then, as Disraeli might have proposed, who does not adore operetta? Now, at any rate, there was no danger of the queen being embarrassed by protocol that impertinently elevated members of her own extended family above herself just because they happened to style themselves ‘Kaiser’. In Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the future 1st Earl of Lytton, moreover, Disraeli imagined he had found the perfect viceroy to summon a durbar of heavily costumed grandeur for the formal proclamation of Victoria’s elevation to queen–empress.
Depending on your point of view, the 44-year-old Lytton was an inspired or catastrophic choice. His father, Edward Bulwer-Lytton Senior, had been a massively popular novelist who specialized in the historically exotic such as The Last Days of Pompeii, which made him a kindred spirit to Disraeli. Paternal loyalty did not prevent Bulwer-Lytton from accusing his son, whom he must have recognized as an inferior talent, of plagiarism. The younger Lytton wrote bad poetry under the pseudonym ‘Owen Meredith’ (the queen apparently loved his verses); had been ambassador to Portugal; and had generally led the life of a handsome, self-consciously lofty man of taste, unsure whether he should or should not be in politics and government. Originally he had been no higher on the list of candidates than fourth. But the Lyttons of Knebworth House were Hertfordshire neighbours of the secretary of state for India, Lord Salisbury, and Disraeli’s own misplaced confidence in Lytton’s ‘imaginative’ potential may well have jumped him up the ranking. There was no doubt that Lytton was able, on demand, to strike a pose of decorative refinement, although the much photographed aristocratic slouch to the right was probably more the result of his chronic haemorrhoids, or the opium habit he had acquired in order to deal with them, than any studied neo-Roman affectation. Taken aback by the government’s invitation, Lytton was not at all sure he wanted the job, not least because of his ‘absolute ignorance of every fact and question concerning India’.
On the other hand, perhaps a second-rate poet with a handsome head might be just the right ornamentalist, in David Cannadine’s sense, to act as master of ceremonies. After his arrival in India in April 1876, most of Lytton’s attention was directed towards accomplishing the grandiose durbar of Disraeli’s dreams. The site was carefully chosen: not the broad greensward of the Maidan at Calcutta, but the high ridge, a mile and a half northwest of Delhi, where the survivors of the Mutiny massacres had retreated and held out for four months; a place that, like the well at Kanpur and the Lucknow Residency, had become a site of obligatory pilgrimage for newcomers to the Raj. Spectacle would now exorcize the memory of slaughter and humiliation. To the task of stunning the childlike orientals into awestruck submission Lytton cheerfully addressed himself. His own notion of paramount rule, echoing Disraeli’s own paternalism, was that it should be felt, not through the handful of Civil Service officials, but through India’s own native princes and ‘gentry’ (whoever they were). Neo-feudalism was the right term for this. The omnipotence and magnificence of the Raj would persuade those native princes to deliver their unconditional loyalty, and in turn the millions subject to the rajahs would treat the Raj as an authentically Indian institution. ‘Politically speaking’, Lytton wrote in one of his typically grandiloquent clichés, ‘[India] is an inert mass – if it ever moves at all it will move in obedience, not to its British benefactors but to its native chiefs and princes however tyrannical they may be.’
The durbar of 1877, then, was conceived as a kind of penance for Macaulay’s sin of having created, through liberal naivety, the Western-educated class of Indian whom Lytton describ
ed as ‘baboos whom we have educated to write semi-seditious articles in the native Press and who really represent nothing but the social anomaly of their own position’. Instead a ‘Statutory Civil Service’ would appoint the Other Kind of Indian – young men from princely dynasties who in reality would not have touched Lytton’s inferior-grade bureaucracy with a barge-pole. Paradoxically, then, the durbar was presented not as the theatrical fantasy it actually was but as the ‘reality’ of ancient India, the India of princes and peasants, soldiers and Brahmins. Gathered in the ‘Indian camp’ were its finest specimens – 300 of the flower of the nobility, along with their retainers, each allotted a miniature ‘territory’ in the encampment, marked by banners (designed by a Calcutta authority on heraldry), richly caparisoned horses and heavily brocaded elephants. The rajahs and maharajahs were differentiated with excruciating attention to pedigree, antiquity and quasi-, semi- or pseudo-independence. (This had already become an institutional orthodoxy in the secretary of state’s office in Whitehall, where two sets of doors had been built so that princes of exactly equal rank might be received simultaneously!) Precedence at the 1877 durbar was defined by gun-salute entitlement, which in turn prescribed size of entourage. Thus the 17-gun-salute princes (the true grandees like the Gaekwar of Baroda and the nizam of Hyderabad, for example) were permitted an entourage of 500 retainers, whilst the 11-gun-salute princes only rated entourages of 300. These still added up. The population of the ‘Indian camp’ alone numbered over 50,000. The ‘imperial’ camp, in other words white, was 10,000 strong and supplied with its own post, telegraph and police stations. Add to that 14,000 parade soldiers and the total durbar encampment accommodated 84,000 souls: a sizeable town in its own right and one that needed Major-General Frederick Roberts, who was about to fight an Afghan war for Lytton, to keep it in order.
