The reader today may find Disraeli’s reliance on such verbiage a trifle trying but there is no doubt that this is the clearest possible description of his concerns about the divisions in society, ones which had in part, he argued, come about because of the lack of power of the landed interest and the growth of industrialisation which had broken the historic bonds. In Coningsby, meanwhile, Disraeli took the opportunity to shape further his vision of a renewed golden age, on this occasion deploying a dialogue between the hero and his grandfather Lord Monmouth. To make his point, Monmouth, who expected Peel to make him a duke, is rebuked by his grandson, who declares, ‘What we want, sir, is not to fashion new dukes and furbish up old Baronies but to establish great principles which may maintain the realm and secure the happiness of the people. Let me see authority once more honoured; a solemn reverence again the habit of our lives; let me see property acknowledging, as in the days of faith that labour is his twin brother, and that the essence of all tenure is the performance of duty …’ His grandfather was not inclined to listen to this lecture but he was not the hero of the novel. It is difficult not to admire the boldness of a politician who was able to write a bracing novel as a thundering manifesto.
The essential point of all this is that Disraeli needed to encapsulate a view of the world that would win the approval of his divided party and that his achievement was to do so. After all, he set out an amazingly attractive proposition which cast the anti-Peelite faction as historic heroes abandoned by an awful leader who was really nothing more than a Whig in disguise. He had remarked of Peel that ‘the Right Honourable gentleman caught the Whigs bathing, and walked away with their clothes’. His view was of a gentle and paternalistic Conservative Party which brought the two nations together. Is it too much to suggest that even as early as the 1840s Disraeli had seen the future for the Tory Party in the light of a widening franchise? That he had recognised that the Conservatives had to unite the classes to survive and that the first step was to persuade the landed class that its interest was to be the protectors of labour?
If Disraeli had such foresight or even saw the glimmerings of the way democracy was developing, the next Reform Act in 1867 suddenly seems much less opportunistic and instead a part of his long-term ideal. For it is undoubtedly the case that the consequences of this Act, which both Lord Derby, the minority Conservative Prime Minister of the day, and Disraeli, the legislation’s chief architect, referred to as ‘a leap in the dark’, were seismic. As a consequence of its passing, some 938,000 voters were added to the electoral role. At a stroke it almost doubled the 1,056,000 roll of existing voters. How did this Act come about?
The usual answer is ‘by accident, with a minority government desperate to remain in office willing to give anything away to win individual votes’. Disraeli’s authoritative biographer Lord Blake called it ‘one of the oddest histories of confusion, cross-purposes and muddle in British political history’. While Roy, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, in his important biography of William Gladstone, saw Disraeli’s primary aim as being to outfox his enemy. Jenkins wrote that ‘[Gladstone] failed to realise that Disraeli’s governing tactic was to defeat any amendment from Gladstone, even if it meant accepting a more extreme one from another source. He had to show that he was winning, and this meant showing that Gladstone was losing.’
The process of the bill was tortuous. The Victorian House of Commons did not have time limits on speeches and did not timetable debates. This meant that any Member could speak for as long as he liked and the fashion of the day was to be long-winded. In addition, party discipline was also less clear-cut than it is today. Members were willing to vote according to their own or local interests and were also prepared to be explicit about this. These parliamentary difficulties had led to the defeat of attempts at electoral reform tabled by Russell’s Liberal government, a defeat in which Disraeli played a leading role, and Derby becoming Prime Minister. The Russell bill had been championed by Gladstone and its defeat led to massive protests around the country. Some 200,000 people gathered to protest in Birmingham, for example, and politicians across the House realised that in such a climate reform would be only a matter of time, regardless of the complexion of the government.
As Jenkins noted, it certainly was one of the ironies of history that Disraeli, who would shortly go on to pilot his own radical electoral reforms through Parliament, was the key player in foiling Gladstone’s rather less far-reaching plans. To do so, he worked with people with whom he had no natural affinity, such as Robert Lowe, a Liberal politician but one who opposed any further extension of democracy, to defeat Russell and Gladstone. This operation involved a delicate balancing act. Lowe and his supporters were known as the ‘Adullamites’, in a biblical allusion to the cave of Adullam where David had sought refuge from King Saul, by their enemies on account of their backward hence ‘cave-dwelling’ political views. They did not want to bring down Russell’s government but they were desperate to halt further electoral reform. In the end Disraeli had his way, Russell’s government did collapse and Derby formed a new minority administration, with Disraeli installed as Chancellor.
Disraeli’s own research quietly demonstrated that his idea of supporting the extension of the franchise would benefit the Conservatives even if some of his fellow party members remained to be convinced. Yet he had no firm plans as to how to go about this, so, with Russell’s administration swept away and Derby in government, Disraeli was forced rapidly to come up with a scheme for reform. There have been quarrels about Disraeli’s real place in this scheme. Blake argues that it was Derby, with the discreet support of the Queen, who pushed for reform while Disraeli was dragged along. However, looking at the broader context this may not be correct. After all, once the bill was tabled in the Commons, Disraeli gave way consistently to all attempts to widen the scope of reform, until the lists of newly enfranchised voters reached close to the million mark. These are unlikely to be the moves of a reluctant politician. Faced with such wide-ranging reform, however, the Cabinet split and a rash of significant resignations followed.
Disraeli may have been willing to do anything to stay in office but with a majority of seventy against him in the Commons he knew that the odds were stacked heavily against him. He played his hand now with great skill, lowered the standing of Gladstone, divided the ranks of the Opposition and even, diplomatically, rejected the proposals of the Queen that the whole question ought to be decided by a committee of the Privy Council on a non-party basis. In addition, he published his speeches on this subject in order to claim the credit for reform. Eventually, Disraeli’s manoeuvres paid off. The Reform Bill received Royal assent in August 1867.
It seems that Disraeli did have a private masterplan, which was to make it appear that Derby was the one pushing for reform while Disraeli was a secondary actor, thus making it much easier for him to carry those Tories suspicious of the whole idea. Nonetheless, to win any vote against his bitter political enemy Gladstone must have been a source of joy to Disraeli. There are further pieces of evidence to back up such a theory. Disraeli had an interesting relationship with the reformer and Liberal MP John Bright, who remarked of him, ‘He conceives it right to strive for a great career with such principles as are in vogue in his age and country – says the politics and principles to suit England must be of the “English type”, but having obtained power, would use it to found a great reputation on great services rendered to the country.’ Bright, of all people, had no particular political need to opine positively on the scope of Disraeli’s vision and for this reason is worth listening to.
In spite of these great reforms, the Conservatives lost the General Election of 1868. Disraeli had, in February of that year, at last achieved his aim of becoming Prime Minister. A gouty Lord Derby resigned on health grounds and Disraeli was summoned to Osborne to receive the all-important invitation from Victoria. ‘Mr Disraeli is Prime Minister!’ the Queen wrote to her daughter Vicky in Prussia. ‘A proud thing for a man “risen from the people” to
have obtained!’ His triumph was short for the election of that December saw Gladstone’s Liberals returned with a large majority and Disraeli retreated to the Opposition benches, to await Liberal mistakes and to spend his leisure time writing yet another novel. Lothair was published in 1870.
Crucially, Disraeli used the time to consolidate the organisation of the Conservative Party, both centrally and in the constituencies. It was at this time that Conservative Central Office evolved as the prime organisational power in the party with sub-bodies established to reinforce its power and influence in the country. One such was the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations, that tentacle of Central Office in charge of organising within newly enfranchised urban communities and if possible claiming the loyalty of these communities to the party. The Union was brought to life when Disraeli deployed it to support his two great speeches of 1872, one in the Manchester Free Trade Hall and the other in the Crystal Palace, which now stood at Sydenham in south London. In both speeches, he excoriated Gladstone’s Liberal government, describing the front bench as ‘a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest.’ The crowds roared their approval but Disraeli’s principal focus in these speeches was not to attack Gladstone, rather to set out the Conservatives’ own distinctive stall, to maintain the institutions of Britain, to elevate ‘the condition of the people’ and to uphold Empire.
At the Crystal Palace on 24 June, he told the crowd:
It must be obvious to all who consider the condition of the multitude with a desire to improve and elevate it that no important step can be gained unless you can effect some reduction of their hours of labour and humanise their toil. The great problem is to be able to achieve such results without violating those principles of economic truth upon which the prosperity of all states depends.
He argued that reforms had indeed been achieved by early Conservative laws in the teeth of opposition by the ‘blatant and loud-mouthed leaders’ of the Liberal Party. He focused on the sense that ‘capital has never accumulated so quickly, that wages were never higher, that the employment of the people was never greater and the country never wealthier’.
All of this was a prelude to the main plank of Disraeli’s offer of a new social vision. His central theme was that ‘the health of the people was the most important question for a statesman’.
It has many branches. It involves the state of the dwellings of the people … their enjoyment of some of the chief elements of nature – air, light and water. It involves the regulation of their industry, the inspection of their toil. It involves the purity of their provisions, and it touches upon all the means by which you may wean them from the habits of excess and brutality.
Responding to disdainful Liberal remarks that he was obsessed by the nation’s sewers, Disraeli turned such scorn to good use, claiming that
to one of the labouring multitude of England, who has found fear always to be one of the inmates of his household – who has, year after year, seen stricken down the children of his loins, on whose sympathy and material support he has looked with hope and confidence, it is not a ‘policy of sewage’ but a question of life and death.
This was forceful rhetoric, not least because it was true. His view of the multitude ‘in possession of personal privileges – of personal rights and liberties – which are not enjoyed by the aristocracies of other countries’ was uniting in tone and his vision for the nation was optimistic:
This issue is … whether you will be content to be a comfortable England, modelled and moulded upon continental principles and meeting in due course an inevitable fate, or whether you will be a great country – an imperial country – a country where your sons, when they rise, rise to paramount positions, and obtain not merely the esteem of their countrymen but command the respect of the world.
It was something else too. It was a manifesto for office delivered two years out from the next General Election. It is also to Disraeli’s great credit that, when the Conservatives were returned to power in 1874 at the head of their first clear election victory in over thirty years, its provisions were to a large extent carried out. Disraeli clearly drove the organisational reform and the policy direction. He set a great many activities in motion but as Prime Minister he has not in recent years been fully acknowledged for what his administration did. His subordinates have been seen as the workhorses, leaving Disraeli perceived as something of a show pony. Is this really fair or does the clock-maker deserve some credit when the clock tells the right time, even if it is wound every week by another?
Under Disraeli’s period of office the Trade Union Act was introduced by Home Secretary Richard Assheton Cross. It was more favourable to organised labour than Gladstone’s equivalent Act of 1871 had been. Cross also promoted the Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act, which allowed slum dwellings to be compulsorily purchased by councils and demolished, and provided for inexpensive loans to construct up-to-date dwellings. This was a stepping stone to further enlightened housing legislation, with the result that Robert Ensor describes the Act as ‘one of the milestones in English legislation on the housing problem’. A Sale of Food and Drugs Act remained the principal legislation in this area until 1928 and a Public Health Act, which tackled the issue of sewage as promised by Disraeli, remained a central element in sanitary law until 1937. Each of these Acts was excellent law and each one was passed in 1875, ironically leading to criticism that nothing much happened in the rest of this period of government. However, four key social Acts covering labour laws, housing, food safety and public health is a pretty impressive haul for any administration. Most crucially, they link directly with all that Disraeli himself had said throughout his career. He must be allowed to take much of the credit for the passage of such legislation.
As for Disraeli’s foreign and imperial policies, these too were successful. They pivot around the decisions which flowed from the Congress of Berlin, which convened in the German capital in the summer of 1878 and in which Disraeli was a prime mover. The Congress brought the six European Great Powers of the Day, Britain herself, plus Austria, France, Germany, Russia and Italy, together with the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan states of Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Romania, with the intention of delineating the territories of the Balkans in the years to come.
The Congress has been much criticised, for being essentially a stitch-up, with all the main decisions made before it even met and for settling affairs in south-east Europe so poorly that grudges and rivalries were permitted to fester unchecked. These then erupted in the form of the First and Second Balkan Wars and eventually the Great War itself. Blake, who was not a Disraeli sympathiser, was clear. The Congress was by no means a stitch-up. He wrote that it is ‘a myth to suggest that the Congress was a mere façade registering decisions already taken in secret between the principal powers concerned’. It can equally be argued that, as a concerted effort to keep peace in Europe, it did what it set out to do. There was peace for another thirty years. This was no mean feat, given the vicious state of affairs in the Balkans in this as in so many eras.
Disraeli, now seventy-three, was at an age when the energy required for such an important event may have been ebbing. Notwithstanding this, he sensibly travelled slowly to Berlin and was full of enthusiasm for the negotiations. He and the formidable German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck came to admire each other. Bismarck famously made the quip ‘der alte Jude, das ist der Mann’ (‘the old Jew, he is the man’), which provides an indication of his opinion of Disraeli. Indeed, it is almost a commentary on the Congress itself, given that Disraeli achieved most of his foreign-policy objectives.
The new state of Bulgaria, before the Congress an expansionist satellite of Russia, was reined in and its Aegean coastline removed. At a stroke, Russian influence in the eastern Mediterranean was trimmed considerably. The Ottoman Empire, a bulwark, albeit a failing one, against Russia in the region was propped up a little longer and Britain took control of the strate
gic island of Cyprus. Disraeli also scored a point off Gladstone, whose views of the Ottomans, stemming from their massacres of Christians in the Balkans in 1876, were understandably harsh. The view in London was that the Congress was a triumph. Disraeli returned a hero and was offered a dukedom by the Queen, plus accession to the Order of the Garter. He declined the dukedom but accepted the Garter on the second occasion it was offered.
In this period as Prime Minister, Disraeli also delivered on other Conservative plans. He was a clear and public supporter of the monarchy. His support was somewhat ostentatious, for his friendship with Victoria enabled him to float the suggestion that she emerge from the seclusion that had followed the death of Albert and show herself to her people and that she agree to his proposal that she be proclaimed the Empress of India. It is easy to ridicule Disraeli’s flattery of the Queen in these years, flattery which he laid on with a trowel, but it is less easy to dismiss the suggestion that he revitalised the monarchy at a time when public support for the institution was low. The friendship between minister and monarch was much observed and commented upon, with the pair featuring in many newspaper cartoons.
The people were understandably cross at the thought that they had a Queen, the so-called ‘Widow of Windsor’, who was seldom seen. Victoria had been in mourning for the loss of Albert for the best part of twenty years and had forced the Court to mourn likewise. If the Queen was essentially invisible, the thinking went, then what was the point of having a monarch at all? Victoria was, moreover, inclined to be difficult. She resented not being kept informed but she equally resented being overworked. Disraeli gossiped with her, conspired with her and in general worked to bring her cheer. In helping Victoria to take suitable steps Disraeli did his Sovereign and the state considerable service.
The Victorians Page 22