The Earl of Beaconsfield

by James Anthony Froude

SPEECH AT TAUNTON

Mr. Labouchere, the member for Taunton, was in the new Ministry. Custom required that he should resign his seat and be re-elected. Disraeli, supported by the Carlton Club, went down to oppose him in the Tory interest. He was late in the field. He soon saw that for the present occasion at least he must again fail; but he found supporters enough to make it worth his while to fight and keep himself conspicuous. ‘As to Taunton itself,’ he wrote in the heat of the conflict,[4] ‘the enthusiasm of Wycombe is a miniature to it, and I believe in point of energy, eloquence, and effect I have far exceeded my former efforts.’ He was beaten, though two-thirds of the electors promised him their votes on the next opportunity. The Taunton election went by, and would have been forgotten like a thousand others but for an incident which grew out of it. Disraeli desired notoriety, and notoriety he was to have. The Irish alliance was not popular in England. Irish alliances never are popular when the meaning of them is to purchase the support of a disloyal faction, to turn the scale in a struggle for power between English parties. Such an alliance had been last tried by Strafford and Charles I., with unpleasant consequences both to them and to Ireland. Now the Whigs were trying the same game—the Whigs, who were the heirs of the Long Parliament. The combination of English Liberals and Irish Papists was in itself a monstrous anomaly. Disraeli had no personal dislike of O’Connell, and had been grateful for his support at Wycombe; but he was now retained on the Tory side, and he used the weapons which were readiest to his hand. In one of the speeches which he thought so successful he had called O’Connell an incendiary, and spoke of the Whigs as ‘grasping his bloody hand.’ The Protestant Somersetshire yeomen no doubt cheered him to his heart’s content. The speech, being exceptionally smart, was reported at length and fell under O’Connell’s eyes. O’Connell was good-natured, but he knew Disraeli only as a young politician whom he had asked to dinner and had endeavoured to serve. Disraeli had gone out of his way to call him bad names, he might well have thought ungraciously and ungratefully. He was himself the unrivalled master of personal abuse. He saw an opening for a bitter joke, and very naturally used it. At a public meeting in Dublin he mentioned the part which he had taken at Wycombe; he had been repaid, he said, by an atrocity of the foulest description.

‘The miscreant had the audacity to style me an incendiary. I was a greater incendiary in 1831 than I am at present, if ever I was one, and he is doubly so for having employed me. He calls me a traitor; my answer to this is, he is a liar. His life is a living lie. He is the most degraded of his species and kind, and England is degraded in tolerating and having on the face of her society a miscreant of his abominable, foul, and atrocious nature. His name shows that he is by descent a Jew. They were once the chosen people of God. There were miscreants amongst them, however, also, and it must certainly have been from one of those that Disraeli descended. He possesses just the qualities of the impenitent thief that died upon the cross, whose name I verily believe must have been Disraeli. For aught I know the present Disraeli is descended from him, and with the impression that he is I now forgive the heir at law of the blasphemous thief that died upon the cross.’

O’CONNELL AND DISRAELI

All the world shouted with laughter. The hit was good, and the provocation, it was generally felt, had been on Disraeli’s side. But there are limits to license of tongue even in political recrimination, and it was felt also that O’Connell had transgressed those limits. An insult so keen and bitter could be met in one way only. Disraeli had already been spattered by the mud which flies so freely in English political contests. He had found that ‘the only way to secure future ease was to take up a proper position early in life, and to show that he would not be insulted with impunity.’ He put himself into the hands of Count d’Orsay. D’Orsay considered that a foreigner should not interfere in a political duel, and found Disraeli another friend; but he undertook himself the management of the affair. O’Connell having once killed an antagonist on an occasion of this kind, had ‘registered a vow in heaven’ that he would never fight again. But Morgan O’Connell had recently fought Lord Alvanley in his father’s behalf, and was now invited to answer for the Dublin speech. If he was to meet every person who had suffered from his father’s tongue his life would have been a short one. He replied that he had fought Lord Alvanley because Lord Alvanley had insulted his father; he was not accountable for what his father might say of other people. Disraeli undertook to obviate this difficulty. He addressed O’Connell in a letter published in the ‘Times,’ which, if less pungent, at least met Morgan O’Connell’s objection. ‘Although,’ he said, ‘you have placed yourself out of the pale of civilisation I am one who will not be insulted even by a yahoo without chastising it.... I admire your scurrilous allusion to my origin; it is clear the hereditary bondsman has already forgotten the clank of his fetters.... I had nothing to appeal to but the good sense of the people. No threatening skeleton canvassed for me. A death’s-head and cross-bones were not blazoned on my banners; my pecuniary resources too were limited. I am not one of those public beggars that we see swarming with their obtrusive boxes in the chapels of your creed, nor am I in possession of a princely revenue from a starving race of fanatical slaves.’

He expected, he said in conclusion, to be a representative of the people before the repeal of the Union. ‘We shall meet at Philippi.’

Disraeli waited at home till the night of the day on which the letter appeared for the effect of his missive. No notice being taken of it, ‘he dressed and went to the opera.’ When Peel had challenged O’Connell some years before, the police interfered; on this occasion the same thing had happened. ‘As I was lying in bed this morning,’ Disraeli wrote on May 9 to his sister, ‘the police officers from Marylebone rushed into my chamber and took me into custody. I am now bound to keep the peace in 500l. sureties—a most unnecessary precaution, as if all the O’Connells were to challenge me I could not think of meeting them now. The general effect is the thing, and that is that all men agree I have shown pluck.’

NOVELS AND SPEECHES

If Disraeli gained nothing by this encounter he at least lost nothing. He was more than ever talked about, and he had won approval from a high authority at any rate. ‘You have no idea,’ said Lord Strangford to him, ‘of the sensation produced at Strathfieldsaye. The Duke said at dinner it was the most manly thing done yet.’ On one side only his outlook was unfavourable. The Taunton election had been a fresh expense. He had again to borrow, and his creditors became pressing. Judgments were out against him for more debts than he could meet. About this time—the date cannot be fixed exactly, but the fact is certain—a sheriff’s officer appeared at Wycombe on the way to Bradenham to arrest him. Dr. Rose,[5] a medical man in the town, heard of the arrival, and sent on an express with a warning ‘to hide Ben in the well.’ Affairs were again smoothed over for the moment. ‘Ben,’ undaunted as ever, worked on upon his own lines. He completed his ‘Vindication of the British Constitution’—vindication rather of Democratic Toryism—amidst the harassing of duns. It was dedicated to Lyndhurst, and Lyndhurst paid him a visit at his father’s house. He had a smart quarrel with the ‘Globe’ over a revival of the O’Connell business. In the spring of 1836 appeared the Runnymede letters in the ‘Times,’ philippics against the Whig leaders after the manner of Junius. He was elected at the Carlton Club, to his great satisfaction, and when the newspapers abused him he quoted a saying of Swift, ‘that the appearance of a man of genius in the world may be always known by the virulence of dunces.’ To assist his finances a proposal was made to him ‘to edit the “Arabian Nights” with notes and an additional tale by the author of “Vivian Grey.”’ He described it as ‘a job which would not take up more than a month of his time’ and by which he might make ‘twelve or fifteen hundred pounds.’ Happily for his literary reputation this adventure was not prosecuted. Some one in the City introduced him to a speculation connected with a Dutch loan, which took him twice to the Hague and taught him the mysteries of finance. More legitimately in the midst of embarrassments and platform speeches he wrote ‘Henrietta Temple’ and ‘Venetia,’ the first a pretty love-story which offered no opportunities for his peculiar gifts, the second an attempt to exhibit in a novel the characters of Byron and Shelley. They would have made a reputation for an ordinary writer. They sustained the public interest in Disraeli. Of his speeches there was one at Wycombe in which he said that there would be no tranquillity in Ireland ‘till the Irish people enjoyed the right to which the people of all countries were entitled, to be maintained by the soil which they cultivated with their labour.’ In another there is a prophetic passage. ‘I cannot force from my mind the conviction that a House of Commons concentrating in itself the whole powers of the State might—I should say would—constitute a despotism of the most formidable and dangerous description.’ A third was the celebrated Ducrow speech—the Whig Premier as Ducrow first riding six horses at once, and as they foundered one by one left at last riding a jackass, which showed what Disraeli could do as a mob orator when he chose to condescend to it.

Bulwer said of one of these speeches that it was the finest in the world, and of one of the novels that it was the very worst. The criticism was smartly worded, and on both sides exaggerated; but it was true that, if Disraeli had been undistinguished as a speaker, his early novels would have been as the ‘flowers of the field,’ charming for the day that was passing over them and then forgotten. His political apprenticeship was at last over; the object of his ambition, the so deeply coveted seat in the House of Commons, was within his reach, and he was to pass into his proper sphere—to pass into it too while still young, for after all that he had done and experienced he was still only thirty-three. Few men, with the odds so heavy against them, had risen so high in so short a time.