The Earl of Beaconsfield

by James Anthony Froude

Such was Disraeli when, in the summer of 1832, he offered himself as a candidate to the electors of High Wycombe. The expected vacancy had occurred. It was the last election under the unreformed constituency. The voters were only some forty or fifty in number. One seat in the borough had been a family property of the Whig Carringtons; the other was under the influence of Sir Thomas Baring, whose interest went with the Government. Disraeli started as a Radical. He desired generally to go into Parliament as a profession, as other men go to the Bar, to make his way to consequence and to fortune. But he did not mean to take any brief which might be offered him. He was infected to some extent by the general Reform enthusiasm. Lord Grey’s measure had taken half their power from the aristocracy and the landed interest, and had given it to the middle classes. There the Whigs desired to stop and to put off the hungry multitude (who expected to be better clothed and fed and housed) with flash notes on the Bank of Liberty. Ardent young men of ability had small belief in the virtues of the middle classes. They were thinking of a Reform which was to make an end of injustice and misery, a remodelling of the world. Carlyle, in the Dumfriesshire Highlands, caught the infection, and believed for a time in the coming of a new era. Disraeli conceived that ‘Toryism was worn out, and he could not condescend to be a Whig.’ He started against the Carringtons on the line of the enthusiasts, advocating the ballot and triennial Parliaments. For cant of all kinds he had the natural hatred which belongs to real ability. The rights of man to what was called liberty he never meddled with. He desired practical results. His dislike of the Whigs recommended him to their enemies, and half his friends in the borough were Tories. The local newspapers supported him as an independent. But help was welcome from any quarter but the Whigs. Bulwer, who worked hard for him, procured commendatory letters from O’Connell, Burdett, and Hume, and these letters were placarded ostentatiously in the Wycombe market-place.

The Government was in alarm for Sir T. Baring’s seat; Colonel Grey, Lord Grey’s son, was brought down as their candidate. Isaac Disraeli seems to have stood aloof and to have left his son to his own resources. Disraeli himself did not mean to lose for want of displaying himself. He drove into Wycombe in an open carriage and four, dressed with his usual extravagance—laced shirt, coat with pink lining, and the morning cane which had so impressed the Gibraltar subalterns. Colonel Grey had arrived on his first visit to the borough, and Disraeli seized the opportunity of his appearance for an impromptu address. ‘All Wycombe was assembled,’ he wrote, describing the scene. ‘Feeling it was the crisis, I jumped upon the portico of the ‘Red Lion’ and gave it them for an hour and a quarter. I can give you no idea of the effect. I made them all mad. A great many absolutely cried. I never made so many friends in my life, and converted so many enemies. All the women are on my side, and wear my colours—pink and white.’ Colonel Grey told Bulwer that he never heard a finer command of words. Wycombe was prouder than ever of its brilliant neighbour; but of course he failed. Hume had shaken the Radicals by withdrawing his support before the election; Government influence and the Carringtons did the rest. Disraeli, however, had made a beginning and never let himself be disheartened.

This election was in June. On August 16 Parliament was dissolved, and he offered himself a second time to the new constituency. He invited them, in his address, to have done with ‘political jargon,’ to ‘make an end of the factious slang of Whig and Tory, two names with one meaning, and only to delude the people,’ and to ‘unite in forming a great national party.’ ‘I come before you,’ he said, ‘to oppose this disgusting system of factions; I come forward wearing the badge of no party and the livery of no faction. I seek your suffrages as an independent neighbour.... I will withhold my support from every Ministry which will not originate some great measure to ameliorate the condition of the lower orders.’ This too was not to serve him. Party government may be theoretically absurd when the rivalry is extended from measures to men. When the functions of an Opposition are not merely to resist what it disapproves, but to dethrone the other side, that they may step into its place, we have a civil war in the midst of us, and a civil war which can never end because the strength of the combatants is periodically renewed at the hustings. Lord Lyndhurst and the Duke of Wellington were by this time interested in Disraeli.

‘The Duke and the Chancellor are besetting old Carrington in my favour,’ he wrote. ‘They say he must yield. I am not sanguine, but was recommended to issue the address. The Duke wrote a strong letter to the chairman of the election committee, saying if Wycombe was not ensured something else must be done for Disraeli, as a man of his acquirements and reputation must not be thrown away. L. showed me the letter, but it is impossible to say how things will go. It is impossible for anyone to be warmer than the Duke or Lyndhurst, and I ought to say the same of Chandos.’

The Carrington family would not yield; Disraeli was defeated again, and it became clear that he must look elsewhere than to Wycombe. More than one seat might have been secured for him if he would have committed himself to a side, but he still insisted that if he entered Parliament he would enter it unfettered by pledges. There was an expected chance at Marylebone. When he proposed himself as a candidate he was asked on what he intended to stand. ‘On my head,’ he answered. Lyndhurst wished him to stand at Lynn as a friend of Lord Chandos. Lord Durham offered to return him as a Radical. ‘He must be a mighty independent personage,’ observed Charles Greville, when he persisted in the same reply. He realised by degrees that he was making himself impossible, but he would not yield without a further effort. There was curiosity about him, which he perhaps overrated, for he published a pamphlet as a self-advertisement, with the title ‘What is He?’ of the same ambitiously neutral tint. His object now was to make himself notorious, and the pamphlet, he said, ‘was as much a favourite with the Tories as with the Rads.’

O’CONNELL AND THE WHIGS

In society he was everywhere, dining with Lyndhurst, dining with O’Connell, or at least invited to dine with him, at fêtes and water parties, at balls and suppers. D’Orsay painted his picture. The world would have spoilt him with vanity if his self-confidence had not been already so great that it would admit of no increase. His debts were growing. He had again borrowed for his election expenses. It was hinted to him that he might mend his fortune by marriage. ‘Would you like Lady —— for a sister-in-law?’ he says in a letter to Miss Disraeli. ‘Very clever, 25,000l., and domestic.’ ‘As for love,’ he added, ‘all my friends who married for love and beauty either beat their wives or live apart from them. This is literally the case. I may commit many follies in life, but I never intend to marry for love, which I am sure is a guarantee for infelicity.’

Whatever might be his faults he was no paltry fortune-hunter. He trusted to himself, and only himself. He did not sit down upon his disappointments. The press at any rate was open to him. He wrote incessantly, ‘passing days in constant composition.’ In the season he was always in London; in the winter either at Bradenham or at some quiet place by himself, riding for health and ‘living solely on snipes.’ Determined to be distinguished, he even made a show, and not a bad one, in the hunting field. Writing from Southend in 1834, he says, ‘Hunted the other day with Sir H. Smythe’s hounds, and though not in pink was the best mounted man in the field, riding an Arabian mare, which I nearly killed—a run of thirty miles, and I stopped at nothing.’

It was as a politician that he was desiring to keep himself before men’s eyes, if not in Parliament yet as a political writer; his pen was busy with a ‘Vindication of the British Constitution,’ but he meant also to be known for the manly qualities which Englishmen respect.

Public events meantime hastened on. In England after each rush in the direction of Liberalism there is always a reaction. Within two years of the passing of the Reform Bill Lord Grey and his friends had disgusted the Radicals in Parliament. The working men, finding that they had been fed with chaff instead of corn, had turned to Chartism. The Tories closed up their broken ranks. The king dismissed the Ministers, and sent to Rome for Peel to take the helm. The step itself may have been premature; but Sir Robert was able to take a commanding position before the country, and form a party strong enough to hold the Whigs in check if too weak to prevent their returning to office. Disraeli, though he never much liked Peel, had found by this time that there was no place in Parliament for a man who had a position to make for himself, unless he joined one party or the other. He swallowed his pride, probably on the advice of Lyndhurst, with whom he was now on intimate terms. The cant of Radicalism was distasteful to him. The Whigs were odious. He made up his mind to enlist under Peel. In the spring of 1835 Lord Melbourne came back in alliance with O’Connell, while the world was ringing with the Rathcormack massacre. Thirteen lives had been lost, and ‘something was to be done’ for the pacification of Ireland. ‘O’Connell is so powerful,’ wrote Disraeli, ‘that he says he will be in the Cabinet. How can the Whigs submit to this? It is the Irish Catholic party that has done all this mischief.’ O’Connell was not taken into the Cabinet, but under the new arrangement would be more powerful than if restrained by office. Disraeli, who had shown in ‘Popanilla’ what he thought about the English administration of that unfortunate island, had said openly that large changes were needed there, but it was another thing to truckle to anarchy and threats of rebellion.