Disraeli
A Personal History
Christopher Hibbert
For John Rae with affection
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
PART ONE 180446
1 BOYHOOD
2 A YOUNG MAN OF HIGH FASHION
3 A CONTINENTAL HOLIDAY
4 MENTAL BREAKDOWN
5 TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES
6 THE JEW DESPRIT
7 THE CANDIDATE
8 AFFAIRS
9 THE REFORMING TORY
10 DEBTS AND DUNS
11 THE MEMBER FOR MAIDSTONE
12 MOST BRILLIANT AND TRIUMPHANT SPEECHES
13 A PRETTY LITTLE WOMAN, A FLIRT AND A RATTLE
14 A TROUBLED COURTSHIP
15 A HAPPY MARRIAGE
16 THE BRILLIANT ORATOR
17 YOUNG ENGLAND
18 CONINGSBY AND SYBIL
19 DAMNING ATTACKS
20 TANCRED
PART TWO 184681
21 THE JOCKEY AND THE JEW
22 THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN
23 THE CHANCELLOR
24 MARITAL DIFFICULTIES
25 BALLS AND BANQUETS
26 VISITS AND VISITORS
27 FÊTES AND FOLLIES
28 DISTINGUISHED PERSONS AND PRIVATE SECRETARIES
29 THE POTENT WIZARD
30 A GUEST AT BALMORAL AND OSBORNE
31 MINISTER IN ATTENDANCE
32 THE WIDOWER
33 FEMALE FRIENDS
34 PRIME MINISTER AGAIN
35 TROUBLES AT COURT
36 EARL OF BEACONSFIELD AND VISCOUNT HUGHENDEN OF HUGHENDEN
37 BERLIN
38 THE GUARDIAN ANGEL
39 THE LAST ACT
40 A WISE AND WORLDLY MAN
REFERENCES
SOURCES
INDEX
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE 1804461 BOYHOOD
He had a taste, not uncommon among schoolboys, for little acts of bargaining and merchandise.
IN CONVERSATION WITH HIS FRIEND, Lord Barrington, Benjamin Disraeli once observed, I was born in a set of chambers in the Adelphi
I may say in a library, for all my fathers rooms were full of books. Like many of the accounts he gave in later years of his family, his childhood and youth, this was not, in fact, true. His fathers rooms were certainly full of books, which Isaac DIsraeli, a bibliophile if not a great scholar, would take pleasure in arranging and rearranging, constantly adding to his collection until it numbered no fewer than twenty-five thousand volumes, taking notes from them on scraps of paper which he would tuck between their leaves, peering at the print shortsightedly, his eyes behind thick spectacles, his chin concealed behind the folds of his white neckcloth, a small black velvet cap over his long curly hair, emerging from his library to talk loquaciously and disjointedly over his meals.
His eldest son, Benjamin, was not, however, born in these chambers in the Adelphi which the Adam brothers had built on land granted to them by the Duke of St Albans not long before. Isaac DIsraeli had lived there as a bachelor; but, not long after his marriage, he had moved to Bloomsbury, to 6 Kings Road, Bedford Row, now 22 Theobalds Road, and it was here, in a house overlooking Grays Inn Garden, that Benjamin was born at half past five on the morning of 21 December 1804.
On the eighth day of his life, a large group of men in black hats and morning coats assembled at 6 Kings Road for the celebration of the brit milah, the circumcision. The baby was placed on one of the two ceremonial chairs which had been brought over from the Bevis Marks synagogue, the other being occupied by the babys paternal grandfather. The mohel, the childs uncle, then performed the operation. After prayers had been said, the baby was returned to the women, who were waiting with coffee, wine, tea and cakes in a nearby room. Here also was Benjamins small sister, Sarah, whose second birthday was to be celebrated the following day.1
For these relations Benjamin was to provide an exotic and largely fictitious ancestry. They were, he liked to think and to say, of Italian descent from one of those Hebrew families whom the Inquisition forced to emigrate from the Spanish Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century, and who found a refuge in the more tolerant territories of the Venetian republicThey assumed the name of DISRAELI, a name never borne before, or since, by any other family, in order that their race might be for ever recognisedThey flourished as merchants for more than two centuries under the protection of the Lion of St Mark.2
Proud of his Jewish ancestry, Disraeli, in his novel, Contarini Fleming, was to ask if the mixed population of Saxons and Normans, among whom he had first seen the light of day, was of purer blood than he? Oh no, he was descended in a direct line from one of the oldest races in the world, from that rigidly separate and unmixed Bedouin race who had developed a high civilization at a time when the inhabitants of England were going half-naked and eating acorns in their woods.
What at least could be said for certain about his forebears was that Disraelis grandfather, also Benjamin, and spelling the name DIsraeli, came to England at the age of eighteen in 1748, the twenty-first year of the reign of King George II, leaving behind two sisters who presided over a school for fellow-Jews in the Venetian ghetto.
A bright young man, Benjamin DIsraeli soon found employment in a Jewish firm in Fenchurch Street which imported goods from Italy. After working for this firm for some years, he married a Spanish Jewess whose family, so his grandson liked to suppose, was far more distinguished than it was and, soon afterwards, he set up his own business as an importer of coral and of those fashionable straw hats from Leghorn so often to be seen in portraits of young ladies by Thomas Gainsborough.
His wife having died in 1764, Benjamin DIsraeli married again within four months and, as with the first wife, his grandson chose to ascribe to the second a more distinguished lineage than she possessed. She was a grumpy, dispiriting woman and her grandson comparing her to those imperious women, Catherine the Great, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough and the loftily intimidating Frances Anne, Marchioness of Londonderry ever afterwards recalled the dreaded weekly visits to her house where there was no kindness, no tea, no tips nothing. In her eighty-third year she came to stay in her sons house and behaved in a kindly manner that astonished all. Depend upon it, her daughter-in-law suggested with well-founded prescience, she is going to die.
After an initially unsuccessful diversification of his business into that of financial speculation, Benjamin DIsraeli became sufficiently prosperous as a stockbroker to buy an impressive country house, attributed to Sir Christopher Wren, at Enfield, where his grandson described him as eating macaroni with his dear friend Sir Horace Mann, for forty-six years British envoy at Florence, although, in fact, the Mann referred to was Sir Horaces nephew and heir, Horatio, Member of Parliament for Sandwich.
After a contented life, which would have been even more so had not his second wife been almost as difficult and demanding as his first, Benjamin DIsraeli, known to his neighbours as Old Mr Israel, died in 1816, leaving what was then an extremely large fortune of £35,000 which, in todays terms, would have been worth well over £1 million.
His only son, Isaac DIsraeli, was then forty years old. He had been a difficult, rather morose child, showing little or no interest in his fathers business and apparently, on one occasion, had run away from home and been found lying on a tombstone in Hackney churchyard. His kindly father, profoundly relieved, hugged him and gave him a pony, much, no doubt, to the annoyance of his stricter mother who firmly believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child.3 It was evidently through her influence that the boy was taken away from the school near his familys house at Enfield and sent to work in the counting-house of his fathers agent in Amsterdam and thence to a firm in Bordeaux. Having shown not the least aptitude for business, taking no interest in politics which he claimed not to understand, and, in the words of his son, Benjamin, being lost in reverie andseeking no better company than a book, he declared that he had written a poem celebrating the evils of business and that he had decided to become a man of letters, despite the ridicule which his mother poured upon the idea. The death of his maternal grandmother, who bequeathed him a handsome legacy, enabled him to fulfil his ambition.4
He was certainly industrious and, despite the diffidence of his manner, assuming. He left one of his poems at Bolt Court for the approval of Samuel Johnson, who was too ill to take notice of it; he approached Vicesimus Knox, master of Tonbridge Grammar School, with the suggestion that he might become a clerkly member of his household in the medieval manner; he sent examples of his work to the topographer and antiquary, Richard Gough; he sought the patronage of Henry James Pye, the future Poet Laureate, whose talents, slender as they were, had been recognized by the Prime Minister, William Pitt, for his support in the House of Commons; and he made the acquaintance of Samuel Rogers, the witty poet and generous host. He also met the antiquary, Francis Douce, on one of his regular visits to the British Museum.
Poems and plays, novels, short stories, oriental romances, satires, biographies and book reviews flowed from his pen as well as publications with such titles as An Essay on the Literary Character; A Dissertation on Anecdotes; Miscellanies or Literary Recollections; Calamities of Authors; Genius of Judaism, and Curiosities of Literature. This last, a collection of sketches, anecdotes and brief essays on all manner of subjects from Men of Genius Deficient in Conversation to The Custom of Saluting after Sneezing, was the most successful of all his books and was reissued in its twelfth edition in 1841.
Samuel Rogers said of him, There is a man with only half an intellect who writes books that must live;5 and, while never renowned for his wit or striking intelligence, Isaac DIsraeli was a welcome enough guest at such dinner tables as that of the publisher, John Murray, while Sir Walter Scott flattered and astonished him by repeating some of his verses when first introduced to him.
Byron was another admirer. Having read Quarrels of Authors, he described it as being most entertaining; and he told Murray, after reading and annotating a copy of the diligent authors Essay on the Literary Character, I have a great respect for Israeli and his talents, and have been amused by them greatly and instructed oftenI dont know a living mans book I have taken up so often or lay down more reluctantly than Israelis.