by James Grant
“I HOPE THAT YOU won’t leave us in the lurch,” were the parting words of the Liberal agents to Bagehot as the defeated candidate returned home to London to lick his wounds. They were referring to more than £1,000 in bribes they had paid without the candidate’s knowledge and in contravention of their assurances to him—and his assurances to the people—that no such methods would be employed. The custom of corruption held that a candidate should reimburse the money that was spent in his name, legitimately or otherwise. Would Bagehot play the game?
The election agents wanted £500 immediately, another £500 “as soon as possible.” They told Bagehot’s lawyer, George Upton Robins—the candidate himself wanted no part of the negotiations—that a refusal to pay would ruin Bagehot’s reputation. His name would “stink,” they said; anywhere he went, people would call him mean. They kept up the pressure, repeatedly calling and writing.
Robins reluctantly decided that Bagehot should pay, and so advised his client. Bagehot assented. He could afford it, though he was far from being the “man of large property” that some in Bridgwater had imagined him to be. A final payment of £240 for “professional fees” and “sundries” closed the matter, or so Bagehot and Robins assumed.19
The matter was not closed. Bridgwater’s name turned out to be the one in bad odor, the fumes wafting all the way to the House of Commons. In 1869 Parliament mounted a full-scale investigation into the stories of the borough’s corruption, calling and interviewing hundreds of witnesses reaching back as far as the election of 1831. Bagehot was on the list to testify, as was Bagehot’s opponent, now the Right Honourable George Patton, Lord Justice Clerk of Scotland.
Papers relating to the Bridgwater corruption inquiry reached Patton in Scotland on the morning of Sunday, September 19, 1869; he seems to have read them before leaving home to attend Presbyterian services with his wife, Margaret. At church, Patton was unable to compose himself. He moved from seat to seat “as if in search of something, and kept turning over the leaves of the books lying in his pew.”20 On Monday morning, he vanished from his estate at Glenalmond, near the central Scottish district of Perth and Kinross, leaving behind only a straight-edged razor and black necktie, both blood-streaked. One week later, his body was discovered in the bed of the river Almond, his throat cut. The death was ruled a suicide.
In testimony before the bribery commission, George Thompson, a friend of Patton’s, said that he had found the jurist in a “very great state of excitement” shortly before his death. Thompson said he had expected that the shame of the revelations about Bridgwater would cause Patton to resign his place on the bench. What he did not expect was that they would lead him to kill himself.21
Bagehot was sworn to testify three weeks after Patton’s suicide. He did not speak about Patton, nor was he asked about him. He told the story of how he himself had come to stand for election, how his agents had bribed voters behind his back, and how their crimes had disgusted him. At the behest of the commissioners, he read aloud his rousing anti-corruption address, and he described his experiences on election day, including a direct proposition from a citizen for money in exchange for a vote.†
At length, the witness came under the questioning of commissioner Thomas Chisholm Anstey, former member of Parliament and ardent champion of the rights of Catholics in England and Ireland. Anstey was a man of fiery radical causes, universal suffrage among them, and could not have been more different than the calm and cool Bagehot. Anstey asked about the money Bagehot had paid to make good his agents’ outlays for bribery. “Did not it occur to you,” he demanded, “that it was retrospective bribery they were asking you to commit?”
“No,” Bagehot replied, “I never heard there was such a thing. I never knew it until reading the Beverley Commission‡ the other day. I am not alleging this as an excuse, but I never knew there was any such crime. I never knew the paying money under such circumstances when bribery had taken place was a criminal offense at all, until the other day.”
Anstey insisted: “Did it not strike you to be, whatever the law was, as complete an offense against the moral code as if you had previously authorized it?”
“I do not say it was right,” Bagehot answered, “that is quite another thing, but I thought you were asking me as to the law.”
Anstey: “Did you not think it a violation of that pledge which you gave so admirably in the words you have read in your speech?”
Bagehot: “I do not think I did. I know I did not want to pay the money then. It was very reluctantly I ever consented to it.”
A second commissioner, Edwin Plumer Price, took over the interrogation. “Was great pressure put upon you to pay this money?” he asked.
Bagehot did not directly answer. He said that what caused him to pay was the fear of being branded a sore loser: “so far from making a good moral impression,” he said, “I should only have made the impression that I was a mean person. A successful candidate, at any rate, can clear himself of that by giving up his seat, but a defeated candidate is left to be virtuous at other people’s expense. That was the feeling in my mind. I am not by any means defending it.”
In a subsequent exchange with Price, Bagehot went so far as to admit that his decision to pay was a “very questionable thing.” The commissioners probed further. They judged that Bagehot was “privy and assenting to some of the corrupt practices extensively prevailing” in the June 1866 by-election, as was the deceased George Patton. Sir John Villiers Shelley—who, like Patton, had died before he could testify—was found to be innocent. Which is to say, “not privy or assenting to any of the corrupt practices so prevailing.”22
No legal charges were brought against Bagehot—the political principals in these cases were rarely charged. Neither were journalistic charges leveled, though the Economist might have had plenty to say against the candidate who turned a blind eye to bribery if that party did not happen to occupy the editor’s chair. Nor did his uncomfortable experience before the Bridgwater commission cause Bagehot to refuse a later opportunity to stand for Parliament—this time as the member for his alma mater, University College London.
* Dundreary, a character in Our American Cousin, an 1858 English stage production, was the epitome of the dimwitted English aristocrat.
† Bagehot quoted the man in West Country dialect. The soliciting citizen had been standing in a doorway, sideways, Bagehot added, “as these rustics do.”
‡ Beverley, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, was a notoriously corrupt constituency that Parliament disenfranchised in 1869. In the final election before it was stricken from the rolls, in 1868, the novelist Anthony Trollope traveled to Beverley to stand as a Liberal candidate for Parliament. He testified before the Bribery Commission that he spent £400, none of it for the purpose of buying votes or treating the electors to beer, for he had exacted an oral pledge from his managers beforehand. “How did you stand on the poll?” the author of Phineas Finn was asked. “At the bottom,” Trollope replied.
CHAPTER 13
BY “INFLUENCE AND CORRUPTION”
Walter Bagehot loathed Benjamin Disraeli. Like most Liberal Victorian intellectuals, he charged the great Conservative leader with flippancy, effrontery, flamboyance, cynicism, and recklessness. He was likely not amused—even if Victoria herself had been—at the novelist–statesman’s supposed quip to Her Majesty, “I am the blank page between the Old and the New Testament.” Nor would he probably have approved of Disraeli impiously comparing the 1847 suspension of the Bank Charter Act to the miracle of the liquefaction of St. Januarius’s blood—“the remedy is equally efficient and equally a hoax.”1
Disraeli was born in London in 1804, the eldest son and second child of Isaac Disraeli, whose private means allowed him to lead a life of non-income-producing contemplation in the Reading Room of the British Library. Born a Jew, Benjamin was baptized in the Church of England at the age of twelve on the strength of a family friend’s argument that the established church, whether or not it could open social
and professional doors for a man called Disraeli, at least wouldn’t slam them shut. Benjamin was also born a Romantic: pushed to the law (after a course of schooling whose principal classroom was his father’s library), the twenty-something Disraeli rebelled. As he had one of his characters say in his novel Vivian Grey, “To be a great lawyer, I must give up my chance of being a great man.”
Instead, young Disraeli determined to strike it rich, and joined a speculative pool in the waning months of the great financial levitation of the mid-1820s. The partners first bet on the short, or bearish side of the market, correctly judging that the bubble would burst. Incorrectly, they gambled that the bursting would occur on their own timetable—a necessarily foreshortened one, as they operated with borrowed money. When, instead, the market made one final upside lurch, they closed out what would prove to be their winning positions. Reversing course, they bought the very shares they had previously sold—South American mining equities, the darlings of the market—hoping to ride them higher. Instead, prices headed lower. Late in 1824, the speculators were out of pocket by £400. By mid-June 1825, they had lost £7,000. At such junctures, one can cut one’s losses or dig in one’s heels. Choosing the latter course, Disraeli produced a series of pamphlets describing the wondrous opportunities on offer in the shares that he and his partners precariously held and attacking the bears, including members of Parliament, who presumed to warn the public against the evident dangers. “It is impossible to say how far Disraeli believed in the correctness of his own statements in these pamphlets,” according to Disraeli’s biographer, Robert Blake, but “What is certain is that the companies which he puffed were worthless concerns based on fraud or at best folly. For one destined to become a master of the art of fiction, this literary debut was perhaps not inappropriate, but it was an odd beginning for a future Chancellor of the Exchequer.”2
Disraeli had had little enough money at the start of this formative investment experience; by the time it was over, he was left with debts that dogged him for decades, and which formed an integral part of a reputation unlikely to win the admiration of a frugal West Country banker.
Impassive by nature, Disraeli bore this crushing obligation with no outward sign of distress. He dressed as exotically as if he were headed to a Byron-themed costume party, and traveled for months on end—in the company of, among others, Lord Byron’s former servant, Tita3—indulging his senses in Turkey, Greece, Egypt, and Spain. Upon returning to England in 1831, he was treated for venereal disease.4
“Miserable” was how Disraeli recalled his aimless twenties,5 but he was not entirely without a plan: he set out to win a seat in Parliament. While members of Parliament received no pay, they enjoyed something that Disraeli had particular reason to value—immunity from imprisonment for debt.*
He stood for Parliament in 1832 as a Radical and lost. Three more attempts ended in defeat, but he was finally handed a safe seat—he was by now a Conservative—and at last entered Parliament in 1837, where he fell in with the Young England reaction against utilitarianism, reform, and the budding art of economic analysis. A protectionist, he favored the landed aristocracy against the theories of the Anti-Corn Law League, and when the Tory prime minister Robert Peel, an avowed protectionist, turned his coat to support free trade, it was Disraeli’s pyrotechnical invective that people remembered. Disraeli spoke like the gifted writer he was. His Sybil, or The Two Nations drew popular attention to the horrific conditions of Britain’s working poor.†
When the Conservative Party won the general election of 1852 and the Tory prime minister, Lord Derby, found himself in need of a suitable chancellor of the exchequer, he fixed on the party’s rising star. Against the insolvent Disraeli’s protests that he knew demonstrably little about finance, Derby reassured him, “You know as much as Mr. Canning did. They give you the figures.” The new chancellor served with flair in a government that lasted only ten months.‡
Disraeli returned as Derby’s chancellor in a second government that was formed in 1858. Reducing and redefining the property qualifications for voting (“Reform!”) was at the top of the legislative agenda, and it fell to Disraeli to steer the government’s bill through the House of Commons. When that reform legislation failed, so did the government—again. Yet the Economist begrudged the chancellor a word of praise: It was Disraeli, and only Disraeli, who had kept the wheels on the Derby omnibus, Bagehot said. Since his less auspicious showing in 1852, he had learned “to lead with dignity and fail with dignity.”6
Not that Disraeli entirely measured up to Bagehot’s standards: This most original figure lacked originality, according to the editor.§ He had no political philosophy, no “political faith—he probably does not know what it means”; his speeches were no more substantive than his novels. The redeeming features of his parliamentary performances were the jibes he deployed in debate—a case of “turning his literary ploughshares and pruning hooks into swords and spears.”7
It would not have been the safest bet in British politics that the principal Tory opponent of Gladstone’s 1866 reform would himself, the very next year, drive through a Conservative reform measure more radical than the one he himself had decried in the wee hours of April 27, 1866,¶ though Bagehot himself could not have been surprised. Philosophical flexibility was, after all, Dizzy’s creed. Following Gladstone’s failure—or, equally, Lowe’s victory—in 1866, the Queen had pressed for a new reform bill; in the wake of Black Friday, Reform League demonstrations drew tens of thousands to Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park to bear witness to the iniquity of the English franchise. Derby and Disraeli, succeeding Russell and Gladstone, resolved to sponsor reform legislation that would one-up the Liberals—or, in Derby’s immortal phrase, “dish the Whigs” (“Whigs,” in this case, being synonymous with the party of Gladstone). When, at length, the Tories did just that, Bagehot stood at his desk to render the Economist’s verdict.
“It is Mr. Disraeli’s bill,” Bagehot judged. “For this end, [Disraeli] induced his party to surrender their creed and their policy; he altered what his followers had to say, even more than the Constitution under which they are going to live. How then did he attain such a singular success?
“It is usual,” he went on, “to say that he attained it by fraud and deceit. And we certainly are not about to defend his morality. On the contrary, we have attacked it often, and, if need were, would attack it now.” But fraud alone could not explain it—it is “too ugly and coarse.” There must be something else. What could that something be? Not—to be sure—Disraeli’s power of abstract reasoning, for of this he had none. “You never know what he is talking about, or whether it means much or little.”
Nor could you tell what he was thinking. Not even his wife, Mary Anne, knew. Among the treasures in the Disraeli papers is a comparison of his personal traits to those of his wife—his to the left, hers to the right, penned in her hand—including:
Very calm
Very effervescent
Manners grave and almost sad
Gay and happy looking when speaking
Never irritable
Very irritable
Often says what he does not think.
Never says anything she does not think.
It is impossible to find out who he likes or dislikes from his manner. He does not show his feelings
Her manner is quite different, and to those she likes she shows her feelings.8
Everyone was struck by Disraeli’s impassivity; his face was a mask to friend and foe alike. To the quickness of “a keen man,” Bagehot perceived, “he joins, by some freak of nature, the imperturbability of an apathetic man. Whether he is quite as impassive as he seems may, indeed, be doubted. Very near observers are said to be able to detect shades of wincing. But very impassible he must be; and it is a sort of ‘double first’ in skirmishing to be so quick to hit, and so hard to be hit.”
A stick-and-move welterweight, then, was the Economist’s estimation of the fighting Disraeli. Yes, he possessed “the most
ingenious and manipulating intellect of his generation” and, yes, he led one of the two principal political parties of the world’s greatest empire. But his party was a party of dunces: “The grade of gentry who fill the country seats, and mostly compose the Conservative party in the Commons, are perhaps the least able and valuable part of English society.”9
Bagehot did have a point with respect to abstract political theorizing: it was not Dizzy’s strong suit, though the Conservative leader was capable of spinning a theory of the English Constitution that passed muster with the master and wardens of the Merchant Taylors’ Company. “My lords and gentlemen,” Disraeli began in an 1868 address to that ancient City guild,
the Constitution of England is not a paper Constitution. [Hear.] It is an aggregation of institutions, many of them founded merely upon prescription, some of them fortified by muniments, but all of them the fruit and experience of an ancient and illustrious people. [Cheers.] And the consequence of this peculiar Constitution has been this—one experienced by no other European nation—that in England, society has always been more powerful than the State [hear].10