Sons, Servants and Statesmen

by John Van der Kiste

  Anxious that credit should be given where it was due, Ponsonby insisted respectfully that Gladstone, unlike Bismarck, was ‘honest and true’, and she should believe that his loyalty and devotion to her as his sovereign was beyond question. To this she replied that he was indeed loyal, but he was, as Lord Palmerston had once said, ‘a very dangerous man’.

  FIVE

  ‘The kindest of Mistresses’

  In January 1874, after a series of by-election defeats, Gladstone declared that his government had been ‘reduced to impotence’, and dissolved parliament two and a half weeks later. A general election gave the Conservatives 350 seats to the Liberals’ 245 and the Home Rulers’ 57. Declaring that he intended to put ‘an interval between Parliament and the grave’, he announced his impending retirement. When he went to Windsor to resign, he found the Queen ‘very kind’, but he declined her offer of a peerage.

  On 17 February she sent for Disraeli, and their meeting was little short of ecstatic. ‘He repeatedly said whatever I wished shd. be done – whatever his difficulties might be!’1 declared the Queen. When he fell to his knees before her to kiss her hand, he effusively assured her that he would plight his troth to ‘the kindest of Mistresses’.2

  In the following week she wrote to her eldest daughter, Alice, the Crown Princess of Prussia, that her outgoing Prime Minister was not merely ‘a very dangerous man’, as Palmerston had warned her. He was also ‘very arrogant, tyrannical and obstinate, with no knowledge of the world or human nature’.3 Alice was a more forward-thinking young woman, who had absorbed her father’s political lessons well, had always admired Gladstone and believed that the Liberals were more in accordance with the prevailing tide of opinion. Mother and daughter were not united on the matter.

  With Disraeli in power for the next six years, Queen Victoria would have a prime minister with whom she could work amicably, a minister who made her feel important and in whose company she could relax. It was almost like the early days of her reign with Melbourne, when ministerial visits became a pleasure, and business was leavened with gossip and pleasant conversations between the plump widow in her fifties and the septuagenarian eccentric who christened her ‘the Faery’. Disraeli flattered her, regarding her with a certain wry amusement, but there was affection as well as unashamed adulation in his attitude. He knew exactly how to win her over with the phrases, gestures and compliments that would delight her. As he sometimes found it necessary to remind his colleagues, it had to be remembered that she was first and foremost a woman.

  While she was shrewd enough to see through the theatricality in Disraeli’s phrases, she relished it for its own sake. She was also well aware how much he enjoyed female company. When he received a box of primroses from Windsor he thanked her, saying that ‘their lustre was enhanced by the condescending hand which showered upon him all the treasures of Spring’. Shortly before his death, he told the poet Matthew Arnold that everyone liked flattery, ‘and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel’.4

  When compared with Gladstone, Disraeli’s attitude to his sovereign during these years could not have differed more. While Gladstone could not resist hectoring the Queen to make a greater effort, Disraeli expressed public sympathy for her condition. He made supportive, not to say sycophantic, speeches about the onerousness of her burdens; and in his novel Lothair, published in 1870, he gave voice to one of the Queen’s most firmly held convictions, namely that in forgetting its sense of duty, the aristocracy was degenerating into an indulgent and worthless caste.

  Faced with an increasingly radical opposition party, Disraeli’s Conservatives were becoming synonymous with policies with which the Queen was more naturally in sympathy. The young sovereign of 1837, a partisan Whig, had changed within thirty years and was now becoming into a true-blue Tory. In a series of public addresses at around this time, her Prime Minister was revealing the policy of the Conservatives as one which supported the monarchy, the House of Lords and the Church, believed in consolidating Britain’s overseas possessions, recognised the importance of social reform and stood for a strong foreign policy, for the greatness of Britain as opposed to Gladstone’s ‘Little England’ theory. While the Liberals were more internationalist, the Conservatives were the more truly national party. Disraeli saw the working classes as conservatives in the best sense, proud of belonging to a great country and keen to maintain its greatness. It was a philosophy which Queen Victoria could hardly disagree with or disapprove of.

  How fortunate, he noted, that he was serving a female sovereign, as he owed everything to women. In the sunset of his life, he proclaimed that he still had a young heart, thanks to the influence of his Queen. It was as well that, unlike Lord Melbourne, he was not serving an inexperienced young sovereign, but a woman of middle age. As his contemporaries observed, the Prime Minister’s many female friends were all grandmothers, and it must have been immensely rewarding for him to be dealing with the greatest grandmother of them all.

  If Queen Victoria was the widow of Windsor, Disraeli was the widower of Hughenden, for Mary Anne had died at the age of eighty in December 1872. Yet the incorrigible old romantic still craved female company, and after his wife’s death he had formed a deep, if rather one-sided, attachment with Selina, Countess of Bradford, a grandmother of fifty-four. Refusing to be broken-hearted when refused by Selina, the undaunted politician proposed to her sister of seventy-one, Lady Chesterfield, on the grounds that marriage to her would bring him closer to her sister. One must doubt how serious his intentions really were. Lady Chesterfield presumably did, for she turned him down, and he had to content himself with carrying on a passionate correspondence with both women.

  Even so, Disraeli had no problem in keeping his promise to do by and large whatever the Queen wanted. Admittedly, after Gladstone, almost any prime minister would have come as a blessed relief; to have one whose political outlook was so well attuned to hers was indeed a bonus. The era of the Prince Albert-influenced liberalism was over, to be replaced by Disraeli’s conservative persuasion – if indeed any persuasion was needed. During his six-year term of office, their ideas coincided more and more. She found herself accepting wholeheartedly his faith in the working together of the aristocracy and lower classes, his belief in a powerful foreign policy and his visions of imperial grandeur.

  However, there were minor differences between monarch and statesman. The Queen’s opinions regarding Church affairs were more strongly held than his, and in his policies of social reform to improve conditions for the working classes, his ‘one nation’ Tory democracy, the Queen was less interested. While she was kind-hearted, even sentimental to a degree, her social conscience was never pronounced, and she was still too ready to accept Lord Melbourne’s glib assurances that dissatisfaction was generally caused by agitators; a laissez-faire attitude was her answer, on the grounds that social injustices would somehow rectify themselves if given time. When Queen Victoria spoke approvingly of the working classes, she had in mind the friendly Highland crofters and farm labourers whom she saw near Balmoral, not the underfed urban masses who lived in squalor in the poorer parts of London and the other industrial cities.

  Even when Queen and Prime Minister were not in full accord on some political question, they could not argue for long. He had a way when they differed, she later told a future Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, of saying ‘Dear Madam’ persuasively, ‘and putting his head to one side’.5 Gladstone’s assertive, hectoring demeanour had got him nowhere, but Disraeli’s intelligent approach could not fail. Sir Henry Ponsonby claimed that he had ‘got the length of her foot exactly’.6 Disraeli coaxed her, he deferred to her, he paid her extravagant compliments on her political judgement and expertise. On the publication in 1868 of extracts from her diaries, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, he had congratulated her fulsomely as ‘the head of the literary profession’, and sometimes when discussing literature, he would slip in the phrase, ‘We authors, Ma’am’.

  Des
pite all the silver-tongued flattery, he never lost sight of the fact that the Queen was a woman of great ability. Now that he was encouraging her to think for herself, instead of always thinking how Albert might have reacted to particular problems had he still been alive, the Queen now followed her intuition, trusting her own judgement for perhaps the first time in her life. No longer was there a husband to insist that political impartiality on the part of the Crown was paramount, and her particular traits, her common sense, determination and, perhaps above all, her obstinacy, became more pronounced. Human nature being as it is, it was hardly surprising that with advancing years her views became less flexible. Even without Disraeli’s encouragement, she would probably have become increasingly self-assured that she was always right. That he was her Prime Minister at the time may have done little more than to reinforce such characteristics.

  In other ways, Disraeli helped to draw her out from the shadow of the Prince Consort. He showed her that she no longer needed to try constantly to improve herself, and that she did not owe it to herself and her country to be a paragon of culture, too intellectual or too serious-minded. He appreciated her for the woman she was and impressed on her the fact that she had no reason to feel inferior about any academic shortcomings. During her married life her intellectual self-confidence had been somewhat undermined by Albert’s knowledgeable spirit and in the early years of her widowhood by Gladstone’s cleverness. Though as well-informed as them, if less learned, Disraeli took care never to make her feel inferior. He even brought a sense of fun, or at least an air of gentle levity, into her life. At the same time, he introduced her to a new sense of vocation, and now she started to take a more lively interest in political affairs. Suddenly she no longer complained that she was overworked, and he took the right approach in urging her to make an effort as she began to busy herself with a renewed sense of purpose.

  Other prime ministers, not least Gladstone, were used to her keeping their audiences with her short. With Disraeli they often lasted longer than an hour, and luncheon might be delayed as a result. Whereas she never thought twice about keeping Gladstone standing, she had a small gilt chair brought in for Disraeli. Once they were so engrossed in conversation that he forgot to keep an eye on the time. He had arranged to take a special train back from Windsor to London at five minutes past five. As the clock struck five he leapt to his feet, hurriedly explained why he had to go and rushed out of the room. Instead of being dismissed, he said later, he dismissed his sovereign.

  Appropriately for a novelist, his letters were as full of sparkle as his conversation. While Gladstone’s memoranda had been so ponderous that Victoria generally required a summary (if not a dictionary) before she could fully grasp them, Disraeli’s were not only lively but succinct, very much to the point. Ponsonby noted with somewhat grudging admiration his ‘wonderful talent for writing in an amusing tone while seizing the points of an argument’. Rather more expansively, Lady Augusta Stanley told Lord Clarendon that ‘Dizzy writes daily letters to the Queen in his best novel style, telling her every scrap of political news dressed up to serve his own purpose, and every scrap of social gossip cooked to amuse her. She declares that she has never had such letters in her life, which is probably true, and that she never before knew everything!’7

  On the occasion of the Queen’s fifty-sixth birthday in May 1875, Disraeli wrote to her that she lived ‘in the hearts and thoughts of many millions, though in none more deeply and more fervently than in the heart of him who, with humble duty, pens these spontaneous lines’.

  How, it might be asked, did such a good judge of character as Queen Victoria accept or even tolerate his undisguised, almost excessive flattery, without wondering whether he might be making fun of her or suspecting he was being ‘false’? Yet she saw through the outward show and relished Disraeli’s extravagant style, seeing it as simply an expression of a romantic temperament, and aware that behind the façade he was scrupulously honest. There was no reason this most eloquent of courtiers could not be an equally serious-minded and trustworthy prime minister.

  How much was she taken in by his extravagant compliments? Did she ever feel that he was teasing her, or merely encouraging her to come out of her shell? Though she lived a life of some seclusion in widowhood, it is difficult to imagine that she can have been so unworldly as not to take his elaborate, even exaggerated, courtliness at face value. One must assume that she was amused by the theatricality and good humour of his glowing phrases, though at the same time she knew better than to be lured into some world of make-believe more redolent of another age.

  According to Algernon Cecil, Disraeli ‘pursued a primrose path of dalliance reminiscent of the Byronic age’. Though the showy waistcoats of his younger days might have gone by the time he assumed high office, ‘his language remained flowery and his flatteries were blatant’.8 No matter how much he might pretend otherwise, the concept of a ‘Faery Queen’ was not one to be taken seriously. But no matter how blatant the flatteries were, Victoria clearly enjoyed and was amused by being on the receiving end as much as he relished bestowing such gilded compliments in the first place.

  During the six years of his premiership, their association developed into something of an idyll, a partnership as much romantic as political. In 1874 the Queen was fifty-four and Disraeli sixty-nine. While others found the dumpy yet indomitably regal Queen Victoria in her black, elaborately bustled dresses and white widow’s veil intimidating, to Disraeli she was invariably charming. He appreciated her kindly eyes, her attractive voice, her silvery laugh, her graceful movements and the warmly welcoming smile on which so many others commented.

  For her part, she found him attractive in her own way. This odd-looking figure could by no stretch of the imagination be called conventionally handsome, but to her he was undeniably poetic, exotic and far more interesting than a good-looking but boring man could ever be. His rouged cheeks, the single dyed curl on the forehead and the rings he wore over white gloves might make give him the appearance of a pantomime figure or a Lewis Carroll creation, but in the Queen’s eyes, such quirks probably made him even more captivating.

  She would never spend more than a night or two at Buckingham Palace, and as Disraeli baulked at the idea of going north to Balmoral, their meetings were generally held at Windsor Castle and Osborne House. He was a reluctant visitor to Windsor, which he called ‘the Temple of the Winds’, and he did not share her passion for fresh air. Neither did he enjoy the formalities of the Court, and would say that all was well as long as he was allowed to keep to his room, or a morning walk, but toilette and evening mannerisms would destroy him. Balmoral, with its freezing temperatures and generally wet weather, he liked even less. Above all, he was not immune to Her Majesty’s occasionally exhausting company. ‘What nerve! What muscle! What energy!’ he groaned. ‘Her Minister is very deficient in all three.’9 Yet he was always unfailingly charming whenever he was with her; as he was too much the courtier to betray his feelings, the Queen never knew that he was not delighted with each visit. Whether in the audience chamber or at the dinner-table, she adored his company. If she saw any of her children, usually Princess Helena or Prince Leopold, laughing at his table talk, she would immediately want to know what he was saying.

  Disraeli may have thought Windsor chilly, but Osborne in poor weather was even worse, not least because of the usually turbulent waters of the Solent to cross. Once she was installed at her island home, even if it was raining, the Queen would be seated in her large parasol-tent, erected on a lawn below the house, where she was surrounded by her dogs, footmen, Highland attendants and black-clad ladies-in-waiting as she ate her breakfast and dealt with her despatch boxes – before receiving her Prime Minister.

  Disraeli’s loss of his wife gave them something in common. After the death of Mary Anne, the Queen wrote to say that she knew exactly what he had lost and what he was suffering. To Lady Bradford he confessed that it was strange he always used to think that the Queen indulged in morbid sentiment,
yet he was going through the same thing – and found it strangely irresistible. It is open to doubt whether either felt quite as much grief as they outwardly demonstrated, especially once the Queen had come through the first few years of widowhood, but there was comfort to be gleaned from the fact that their respective losses brought them even closer.

  Unlike most of Victoria’s other prime ministers, Disraeli was well aware that she would respond to a personal approach, that he needed to reach beyond the invisible barrier of the sovereign’s status and the self-imposed dignity that she had acquired as necessary to her status. As such, he was one of the few men who dealt with her regularly and knew she had to be treated as a human being instead of as a deity on earth. More than most kings and queens, Victoria needed someone with whom she could be herself. Disraeli realised that her forbidding expression and stern demeanour hid a warm, even shy, personality, and that if handled with courtesy and tact, she would become a very different person. His efforts to woo her were as determined as his attempts to woo other women in the past, be they wives or widows and dowagers. While it was a discreet, respectful and innocent courtship, there was something of a whiff of courtship about it all the same.

  Observers certainly suspected that Disraeli’s personal relationship with the Queen included an element of courtship, albeit innocent and respectful. It was never anything if not decorous, for the old widower was an incurable romantic, and his wife’s death probably allowed him a degree of licence to pursue his flirtation further than he might have done had she still been alive. His association with the Countess of Bradford was always more one of friendship and less an affair of the heart, and over the years he came to depend more on the Queen, who in a way epitomised the indulgent mother-figure he had long sought.

  In his way, he must have believed that he was a little in love with the Queen, and he certainly never minded fostering the impression that the feeling was mutual. She was not in love with him, except in a strictly platonic sense, but the effect on her personality was very important. For the first time since the death of the Prince Consort, he made her feel desirable, ready for a little gentle flirtation, some joking and flattery, in a way which nobody else could, or would ever dare. It all proved invaluable in enhancing her personal self-esteem, as well as bringing into her life a sense of fantasy, a way to kindle her imagination. This make-believe world of the ‘Faery Queen’ which he created with gifts of primroses and snowdrops and violets added a sense of colour and gaiety to her existence. It was not exactly love, but something not unlike it.