Victoria and Albert’s tally of nine children and their habit of spending a great deal of time together naturally indicate the truth of a happy and successful marriage but the Royal couple managed to create a sense of normality about their homes too. Both the Italianate Osborne on the Isle of Wight which was purchased in 1844 and remodelled by Albert in subsequent years, and the baronial castle at Balmoral, rebuilt from 1853, with a good deal of direction from the Prince, manage to be impressive without undue ostentation. This relatively low-key culture of Royal life brought respect and affection. Moreover, Victoria and Albert eschewed excessive security and in spite of repeated assassination attempts the pair projected an air of approachability and began to travel around Britain in ways that their predecessors would have found unimaginable.
Royal ceremonial began to improve too, to general approval. Victoria’s coronation had been chaotic enough with the elderly Lord Rolle living up to his name and rolling down the steps, ‘rolled right down’, the new Queen wrote later, after he had paid homage to Her Majesty. By the time of Victoria’s death, assiduous practice had made perfect: the coronation of Edward VII’s reign was an exercise in perfection and acted as a showpiece for the monarchy. This, in turn, became all the more important as the methods of distributing pictures improved. Not merely Court ceremonial but simple family scenes could be readily circulated and the image of Albert, Victoria and the children is one that is still easy to conjure up in the mind’s eye. This was not all by design, nor was it entirely to Albert’s credit, but his was the major role for twenty-one years.
Albert’s virtues were hard work, dutifulness and also inspiration. His handwritten letters to senior ministers such as Palmerston could run to a dozen pages or more and he drafted endless letters for the Queen to rewrite when they had to be despatched in her name. A man who liked early nights and fell asleep at parties must nonetheless have worked long into the night to produce all this correspondence. Nor did the work ever end. Even at Balmoral or Osborne, Albert kept working, sending and receiving papers or making local visits of any relevant works. Duty was Albert’s watchword. He never shied away from what was required, be it another formal speech at a dinner or making the Household a little more efficient.
Most crucially, Prince Albert was not the frightful bore of some historical accounts. He was reserved, he did not seek to display emotion in public but he possessed the inspiration that genius requires. The Great Exhibition was the clearest example of this but his friendship with leading scientists and artists showed the range of his interests. Even when almost overwhelmed with work on the Exhibition, he had time to suggest Tennyson for the position of Poet Laureate against the instincts of Lord John Russell, the Prime Minister, who seemed not to have heard of the poet. Albert’s main contribution to the nation was that he left the monarchy in a much safer state than he found it and he survived the manifold criticisms that were made of him, primarily for being German. Albert fought the good fight, finished the course and kept the faith. He was a truly virtuous Victorian.
Disraeli: The OneNation Conservative
Benjamin Disraeli, first Earl of Beaconsfield (21 December 1804–19 April 1881), is remembered for many striking and wildly varying aspects of his life and long career. He was a master of statecraft and his political cunning and oratorical skills knew few rivals. He was the writer of long novels, an ability which raised eyebrows in the political world. His close friendship with Queen Victoria caused envy and no little resentment and arguably saved the British monarchy from sinking into an abyss of unpopularity. He was one half, with William Gladstone, of a great and profound political rivalry and there seems little doubt that the energy this rivalry generated did neither gentleman nor their respective political parties any harm. He blazed a trail as the first person born Jewish to occupy Downing Street and as the first member of an ethnic minority to hold one the great offices of state.
Disraeli was hopeless with money but happily he married well, in the process providing himself with the support necessary to build a lasting political career and to secure his reputation for posterity. Critically, his was the decisive influence in consolidating the modern British Conservative Party in the aftermath of its troubled birth and it was his work that helped position the party both as a friend of the British citizen and a supporter of the British imperial adventure. He is remembered too as an incorrigible self-publicist whose ability to work on his own reputation knew no bounds. While a disastrous relationship with money is never an asset to any ambitious politician, he was profoundly self-assured and this confidence enabled him to navigate the choppiest of waters and stay dry and untroubled through it all.
He was a conundrum, both to contemporary observers who watched his career narrowly and with pursed lips and to historians today. How could such a complicated individual climb to the top of the Victorian greasy pole?
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Benjamin Disraeli was born into middle-class circumstances off Bedford Row in Bloomsbury, in the early nineteenth century, when it was still being laid out as a neighbourhood of handsome squares and terraces north of London’s West End. He was the second child of the Jewish scholar Isaac D’Israeli, whose parents had moved from Italy in the middle of the eighteenth century, and his wife Maria Basevi, whose family also had Italian-Jewish antecedents. It is of no little significance that Benjamin Disraeli would later take some trouble to romanticise the roots and lineage of his father’s side of the family. They were Sephardic Jews and merchants but Disraeli, in a sign of the discomfort he felt at his lingering status as an outsider within the British elite, liked to claim that they were rather more grand, in social terms, than was the case.
The elder D’Israeli was a man of letters but for his son’s career the most significant event of his life and that of his family came in 1813. In that year, a simmering quarrel with his home Bevis Marks synagogue in the City of London culminated in Isaac D’Israeli’s decision to remove his five children from the synagogue and instruction in the Jewish faith. Four years later, in the summer of 1817, he and his wife agreed to have their children baptised as Anglicans. This was a decision momentous enough in its own right but its ripples would run through the remainder of the life of Benjamin Disraeli. Until 1858, Members of Parliament were required to swear an oath of allegiance ‘on the true faith of a Christian’, meaning that at least nominal conversion was necessary. This parental decision was thus a pivotal moment for their son. Quite simply, it made his future possible.
His younger brothers would be sent to Winchester but Benjamin did not receive this considerable advantage from his parents and was instead despatched to a series of rather less exalted London schools. This was presumably with the best of intentions. The young Disraeli had delicate health and his parents would have wanted him closer to home but this issue of his education evidently was a touchy one in Disraeli’s later life. He blamed his mother for what seemed to him the most unwise of decisions. He then trained as a solicitor – and it was at this point that he and his siblings changed their surname from D’Israeli to the less complicated Disraeli – before securing admittance to Lincoln’s Inn and in 1824 to the stock exchange, where he began exploring the world of speculative commodity trading.
This move came at what appeared to be a most auspicious moment. The disintegration of the Spanish Empire in Latin America opened the continent’s mineral wealth to the world and Disraeli was eager to have his share in what was a rapidly expanding world of commodities. He had little money of his own to fund such a financial adventure so he entered into a financial partnership. He wrote pamphlets extolling the virtues of the investment opportunities in the Americas and teamed up with law clerk Thomas Mullett Evans and with Robert Messer, a stockbroker’s son, to purchase shares in both the Colombian Mining and Anglo-Mexican Mining Associations. Alas for Disraeli and his partners the shares in both companies began almost at once to fall sharply while the Lord Chancellor started to examine the actions of those individuals seen as promoting ‘bubble’ invest
ments, threatening them with prosecution under the South Sea Bubble Act.
By the summer of 1825, Disraeli and his partners had lost over £7,000, at the time a vast sum. It was the beginning of a pattern of debt accumulation for Disraeli. His debts to Messer were not repaid until 1849 and for many years he was obliged to rely on his father’s pocket and on the cultivation of wealthy friends in order to make ends meet. Poor and unwise investment is not a particular sin, and the most intelligent people can fall victim – Sir Isaac Newton, for example, had joined the South Sea Bubble in 1720, just before its collapse – but Disraeli threw his weight behind an enterprise without doing due diligence on it. He publicly extolled the virtues of companies he ought to have known were worthless. That he did so to boost the value of his own investment and to save himself from further losses is an activity that would now be illegal and subject to fierce regulatory penalty. This disagreeable episode stands as one of the early debits against Disraeli’s name and his detractors have used this to denigrate his reputation.
Disraeli’s dire financial straits led directly to the development of another thread in an already distinctive life. He took to writing novels, noting within the burgeoning ranks of middle-class Britons a wish to peep into the more exalted lives of the aristocracy. Fulfilling such a wish might make some money and a first novel was duly forthcoming. Vivian Grey was published anonymously in four volumes between 1826 and 1827 and it sold well too but soon the critics noted aspects of the book that did not please. The writer purported to tell a story of aristocratic life, the reviewers complained, but that story was littered with errors and solecisms, revealing the writer to be a fraud and outsider rather than the insider telling a story of a world known well. Which was the truth, for Disraeli did not yet move in exalted circles and such criticism must have stung. It did so even more when Disraeli was unmasked as the author and his reputation received lasting damage. Not that the criticism he received stopped him writing. One novel followed another for the rest of his life, with Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845) perhaps the most famous.
His need for funds also meant that Disraeli borrowed from almost anyone willing to lend to him. Thus he developed a friendship with Benjamin and Sara Austen. Benjamin Austen was a lawyer for whom Disraeli had worked and Disraeli was said by uncharitable observers to have flirted with Sara Austen in order to extract loans from her husband. These loans, which ultimately had to be repaid by Isaac D’Israeli, were not inconsiderable. At Christmas 1833, Austen lent Disraeli £1,200 and in 1837 the two fell out permanently. Nor did these regular transfusions stop his finances deteriorating, even though he applied to his father for two more loans and was chased around Buckinghamshire during a by-election in 1837 by his creditors. By 1841, Disraeli was at least £20,000 in debt from his own extravagancies and from the high interest on past loans. His income was not large enough to sustain such levels of debt. Even his entry to Parliament in 1837 as one of the two Tory Members for Maidstone did not help his case, for MPs in those days did not draw a salary and Disraeli’s finances remained in a parlous state until his marriage.
Marriage, however, would not come until 1839 and in the meantime his private life continued on its strikingly unconventional course. He had taken a tour of pleasure to southern Europe and the Levant in 1830–31, in the company of his sister’s fiancé William Meredith. The tour had to be truncated when Meredith died of smallpox in Egypt and Disraeli himself returned to England requiring treatment for an unpleasant disease. The tour nonetheless expanded his horizons and alerted him to the wideness of the world and to the pleasures that might be taken from it. His private life was for some time thereafter more Regency than Victorian.
Take his affair with Henrietta Sykes, the wife of the wealthy Berkshire landowner Sir Francis Sykes whom he first met in 1834. This was carried out openly for two years, in a way that could have been catastrophic for his future prospects. The connection between them would give psychiatrists a field day, for Lady Sykes signed off a letter to Disraeli as ‘your mother’. Sir Francis, who had a mistress of his own, was mainly unconcerned by the affair but on one occasion he banned his wife from seeing Disraeli again. However, this order was promptly rescinded when Henrietta called at the house of her husband’s mistress and found him there with her. This led to an accommodation.
However, Lady Sykes’s visits to the D’Israeli family home at Bradenham near High Wycombe, where Benjamin Disraeli continued to live with his parents, scandalised polite Buckinghamshire society. Later, Sir Francis would bring proceedings for ‘criminal conversation’ against the prominent Irish painter Daniel Maclise, whom he had caught in flagrante delicto with his wife. Although the case did not go ahead, the thought that a similar case could have seen Disraeli pursued through the courts before his political career had even taken off shows what a risk he was taking. Disraeli, characteristically, turned the episode into a novel, barely troubling to offer a disguise. Henrietta Temple was published in 1837.
Disraeli also needed money to fund his political ambitions. Prior to his success at Maidstone, he had stood as a Radical in the elections of 1831 and 1832, declaring that the Tory faction at Westminster was old and worn out, yet he could and would not be a Whig. His politics at this time, however, defied easy categorisation. He favoured the extension of the franchise, yet he also favoured protectionism. From 1834 onwards he began gravitating decisively towards Tory politics. In the following year, he stood as a Radical for the last time on his home turf of High Wycombe and in the same year he stood for the first time as a Tory, for the constituency of Taunton, where he incurred the enmity of the Irish leader Daniel O’Connell, who had misunderstood a newspaper report and concluded that Disraeli had been maligning him. O’Connell was well able to malign in return, dismissing Disraeli as ‘a reptile … just fit now, after being twice discarded by the people, to become a Conservative’ and continuing for some time in the same vigorous vein. Mutual mud-slinging followed but all publicity is good publicity and the quarrel did Disraeli no harm. He did not win Taunton but he came close and he propelled himself to public notice for the first time. His victory at Maidstone followed a few months beyond two years.
When marriage at last took place in 1839, it brought a degree of order and stability to Disraeli’s life and it also provided vital cash. Mary Anne Lewis was twelve years older than her suitor and was the widow of the rich parliamentarian Wyndham Lewis, an associate of Disraeli with whom he had shared the Maidstone parliamentary seat. Later, Disraeli freely admitted that he had courted her with her money in mind: ‘When I first made my advances to you,’ he told her, ‘I was influenced by no romantic feeling’ and the fact is that he found her money not merely useful but essential for his political career. Fortunately for both husband and wife, Lewis had tied his estate up carefully. Mary Anne Lewis had no control over her assets in those days before the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 and this was just as well. There is every chance that Disraeli, given the opportunity and his record, would have run through it all quite quickly.
Yet there was money available, enough for Disraeli to pay an estimated £13,000 off his debts. He also showed signs of real devotion to his wife, ‘whose sweet voice’, he wrote in the dedication to Sybil, ‘has often encouraged, and whose taste and judgment have ever guided, [its] pages; the most severe of critics, but – a perfect Wife’. She certainly was devoted. Once, having caught her hand painfully in a carriage door, she held her tongue rather than put her husband off his speech. Such was her support for him that Disraeli praised her habit of having supper ready for him following late-night sittings at the Commons as being ‘more like a mistress than a wife’.
This was the stability that Disraeli needed and craved. He did not stop his flirtations with other ladies and he continued a correspondence with a number of close female friends but Mary Anne was his great support. She was an unusual lady, spirited, plain-spoken and a chatterbox, although not as educated as she could have been. Disraeli said she ‘did not
know who came first: the Greeks or the Romans’. She was also that priceless political asset, a popular wife. People liked her and she made it possible for Disraeli to achieve his ambition. It is difficult to imagine how he could have pursued his career without her moral as well as financial support. Marriage released his energies entirely for political ends and, once Sir Robert Peel became Prime Minister in 1841, Disraeli went to the centre of events.
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Benjamin Disraeli’s relationship with Peel caused the greatest damage to Disraeli’s reputation. Although skilled with language, Disraeli attacked Peel with an excessive degree of vituperation against the policies and strategies of a gentleman who was older, who had earned the respect of many colleagues and the friendship of Prince Albert, who possessed a wealth of experience and who was a statesman of some standing. Disraeli’s boldness ruffled feathers at Westminster and bestowed on the younger man a reputation for excess.
The relationship had begun fairly well. In the election of 1841, Disraeli switched seats from Maidstone to Shrewsbury. He harboured from the first ambitions for ministerial office but these were not met by the new Prime Minister. Disraeli waited his moment on the backbenches with something that might have resembled patience. Moreover, he thought he shared with Peel a fair amount of common ground at this time. Peel did not flourish his changing opinions on the question of free trade until 1845 so there was, for the moment, little in the Prime Minister’s words to vex Disraeli. He instead used his time networking and cultivating a reputation for foreign policy nous. He also began to develop an overtly paternalistic political philosophy, the forerunner of what later became known as ‘onenation Conservatism’. His opinion was that the Tories must pressure landowners to ally with the working class against the rising mercantile middle classes. The landowners could protect the workers from exploitation by business and could claim their loyalty and defence of the status quo in return. He would in time have the chance to put this philosophy into practice.
The Victorians Page 20