Читать книгу Disraeli: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 10

‘We ate; we drank; we ate with our fingers, we drank in a manner I never recollect – the wine was not bad but had it been poison…it was such a compliment for a Moslemin that I must quaff it all…we quaffed it in rivers. The Bey called for the Brandy…we drank it all – the room turned round.’

‘THIS ROCK’, wrote Disraeli of Gibraltar, ‘is a wonderful place with a population infinitely diversified – Moors with costumes radiant as a rainbow or an eastern melodrama…Jews with gaberdines and skullcaps, Genoese, Highlanders [of the garrison] and Spaniards.’¹

‘In the Garrison Library’, he told his father, ‘are all your books’, adding archly, ‘it also possesses a copy of another book, supposed to be written by a member of our family, and which is looked upon at Gibraltar as one of the masterpieces of the nineteenth century. You may feel their intellectual pulse from this. At first I apologised and talked of youthful blunders and all that, really being ashamed; but finding them, to my astonishment, sincere, and fearing they were stupid enough to adopt my last opinion, I shifted my position just in time, looked very grand, and passed myself off as a child of the sun, like the Spaniard in Peru.’²

He had arrived at Gibraltar with William Meredith in the middle of June 1830 and had soon been presented to General Sir George Don, the acting governor of the fortress in the absence of its official governor, the Duke of Kent.

Don was ‘a very fine old gentleman almost regal in his manner,’ so Disraeli wrote. ‘He possesses a large private fortune, all of which he here disburses, and has ornamented Gibraltar, as a lover does his mistress.’³

So often drawn to women older than himself, Disraeli was much taken with Lady Don, who was ‘without exception one of the most agreeable personages [he] had ever met, excessively acute and piquante…To listen to her you would think you were charming away the hour with a blooming beauty in Mayfair; and, though excessively infirm, her eye is so brilliant and so full of moquerie that you quite forget her wrinkles. All in all,’ he added with characteristic hyperbole, she was ‘the cleverest and most charming woman [he] had ever met’.⁴

As well as Government House, a former convent, where he introduced his visitors to his favourite drink, champagne and lemonade, Sir George enjoyed the use of ‘a delightful Pavillion…at the extreme point of the Rock’ as well as a villa at San Roque. He suggested that, having enjoyed his hospitality at these places, his guests should make an excursion into Spain, a venture which foreign tourists seldom undertook since the few posadas offered little apart from a roof for the night and plenty of bugs. But the scenery was ‘most beautiful’ and, although the terrain was infested with robbers and smugglers, these miscreants, so Disraeli was assured, ‘commit no personal violence but lay you on the ground and clean out your pockets. If you have less than sixteen dollars they shoot you. That is the tariff and is a loss worth risking.’ In the event, Disraeli and Meredith were not troubled by these bandits; but on their return to Griffith’s Hotel in Gibraltar they encountered two Englishmen who had been robbed of all their possessions in a village through which they also had passed a day or two earlier with their French guide and manservant, an excellent cook and ‘celeberated shot’ who, so Disraeli said, ‘could speak all languages except English of which he [made] a sad affair’.

He is fifty but light as a butterfly…He did everything, remedied every inconvenience, and found an expedient for every difficulty. Never did I live so well as among these wild mountains of Andalusia, so exquisite is his cookery…

You will wonder how we managed to extract pleasure from a life which afforded us hourly peril for our purses and perhaps for our lives, which induced fatigue greater than I ever experienced, for there are no roads and we were never less than eight hours a day on…two little Andalusian mountain horses.⁵

Disraeli ended his long letter to Bradenham by sending his fondest regards to his ‘beloved Sa’ and ‘a thousand kisses’ to his ‘dearest mother’. ‘Tell Ralph I have not forgotten his promise of an occasional letter…And tell [Washington] Irving [whose Legends of Alhambra was to be published shortly] that he has left a golden name in Spain.’

Disraeli and Meredith were themselves so taken with Spain that they stayed there for two months, far longer than they had originally intended. In the middle of July, they went to Cadiz where ‘Figaro [was] in every street, and Rosina in every balcony’.⁶ And, towards the end of the month, they were in Seville, where Disraeli wrote to his father to tell him that, while his health had improved and the ‘fearful heat’ of Seville suited him, the improvement was ‘very slight’ and his recovery would, at best, be ‘a long affair’. He was even more pessimistic in a letter from Granada to his mother, to whom he complained about the palpitations in his heart and head which were followed by ‘an indescribable feeling of idiocy’ and ‘for hours’ he was ‘plunged into a state of the darkest despair’.

He was worried also by what he took to be incipient baldness: ‘I am sorry to say my hair is coming off, just at the moment it had attained the highest perfection, and was universally mistaken for a wig, so that I was obliged to let the women pull it to satisfy their curiosity. Let me know what my mother thinks. There are no wigs here that I cd wear. Pomade and all that is quite a delusion. Somebody recommends me cocoa-nut oil, which I cd get here, but suppose it turns it grey or blue or green?’

In her reply, Sarah told him that ‘Mamma advises him to try Coca-Nut or anything’. She was sure that she could arrange for him to be sent a wig.⁷

In a letter to his mother, he said that if he were a Roman Catholic he would enter a convent, ‘But as I am a member of a family to which I am devotedly attached and a good Protestant I shall return to them and to my country, and to a solitary room which I will never leave. I shall see no one and speak with no one. I am serious. Prepare yourself for this.’

The tone of the rest of his letter, however, belied this gloomy prognostication. Although, as he said, ‘rather an admirer of the blonde’, he wrote enthusiastically of Spanish ladies, ‘their glossy black hair and black mantillas, their gleaming eyes and dignified grace’. He wrote also of the delicious fruits of the Peninsula, of paella, ‘the most delicious dish in the world’, and of tomato sauce for which he provided a recipe – and, having done so, he added a note for his mother: ‘I need not tell the mistress [of] so experienced a cuisine as you to add a small quantity of onion in frying the tomatas.’⁸

I travelled through the whole of Andalusia on horseback [he reported with pride to Benjamin Austen]. I was never less than twelve hours on my steed, and more than once saw the sun set and rise without quitting my saddle, which few men can say, and I never wish to say again. I visited Cadiz, Seville, Cordova and Granada…I sailed upon the Guadalquivir, I cheered at bullfights; I lived for a week among brigands and wandered in the fantastic halls of the delicate Alhambra [a building which stood comparison, he thought, with the Parthenon and York Minster].

I entered Spain a sceptic with regard to their robbers, and listened to all their romances with a smile. I lived to change my opinion. I at length found a country where adventure is the common course of existence.⁹

‘Run, my dear fellow, to Seville,’ he told Austen in another letter, ‘and for the first time in your life know what a great artist is – Murillo, Murillo, Murillo!’¹⁰

On his way to Córdoba, riding by moonlight, his party’s guide suddenly informed them that ‘he heard a trampling of horses in the distance’, and Disraeli gave an entertaining description of his alarm in a letter to his sister:

Ave Maria! A cold perspiration came over me. Decidedly they approached, but rather an uproarious crew. We drew up out of pure fear, and I had my purse ready. The band turned out to be a company of actors travelling to Cordova. There they were, dresses and decorations, scenery and machinery, all on mules and donkeys. The singers rehearsing an opera; the principal tragedian riding on an ass; and the buffo, most serious, looking as grave as night, with a cigar, and in greater agitation than them all. Then there were women in side-saddles, and whole panniers of children…All irresistibly reminded me of Cervantes. We proceed and meet a caravan of armed merchants, who challenged us, and I nearly got shot for not answering in time. Then come two travelling friars who give us their blessing and then we lose our way. We wander about all night, dawn breaks, and we stumble on some peasants sleeping in the field amid their harvest. We learn that we cannot regain our road, and, utterly wearied, we finally sink to sound sleep with our pack-saddles for our pillows.¹¹

The occasional complaints about his health in his letters are at odds with passages of cheerfully facetious self-congratulation:

I maintain my reputation of being a great judge of costume to the admiration and envy of many subalterns [he had written from Gibraltar]. I have also the fame of being the first who ever passed the Straits with two canes, a morning and an evening cane. I change my cane as the gun fires…It is wonderful the effect these magical wands produce.¹²

He later added a fan to his accoutrements, which made the canes ‘extremely jealous’.

At the Alhambra in Granada, so Meredith said, the elderly guide was convinced that Disraeli ‘was a Moor, many of whom come to visit this palace, which, they say, will be theirs yet again. His southern aspect, the style in which he paced the gorgeous apartments and sat himself in the seat of the Abencerrajes [a prominent family in the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada in the fifteenth century], his parting speech, “Es mi casa”, “This is my palace”, all quite deceived the guide.’

‘Oh! Wonderful Spain!’ Disraeli wrote enthusiastically to his sister on 14 August. ‘Think of this romantic land covered with Moorish ruins and full of Murillo!…I thought that enthusiasm was dead within me and that nothing could be new. I have hit perhaps upon the only country which could have upset my theory, a country of which I have read little, and thought nothing, a country of which, indeed, nothing has been written and which few visit.’ ‘I dare to say’, he added, ‘that I am better.’

He was occasionally homesick, though. ‘Write to me about Bradenham,’ he told Sarah, ‘about dogs and horses, gardens, who calls, who my father sees in London, what is said. That is what I want. Never mind public news…Keep on writing but don’t bore yourself. A thousand, thousand loves to all. Adieu, my beloved. We shall soon meet. There is no place like Bradenham, and each moment I feel better I want to come back.’¹³

A few days after this letter was written, Disraeli and Meredith sailed for Malta, where they were incarcerated for a week in the Lazaretto before being allowed out to take rooms at Beverley’s, a much better hotel than the ‘horrid’ Griffith’s Hotel in Gibraltar.

Valetta, the capital of Malta, was a place of which he expected nothing and found much, Disraeli wrote in a letter to Benjamin Austen. Indeed, he said, ‘it surprises me as one of the most beautiful cities I have ever visited, something between Venice and Cadiz…It has not a single tree but the city is truly magnificent, full of palaces worthy of Palladio.’¹⁴

Here they met a handsome and dissipated young man, a most energetic womanizer, James Clay, who had been at Oxford with Meredith. He was the son of a rich merchant and a nephew of Sir William Clay, Secretary to the Board of Control in Lord Melbourne’s ministry. He had chartered an impressive fifty-five-ton yacht with a crew of seven, and was attended by an equally impressive-looking manservant with mustachios which, in Disraeli’s words, ‘touch the earth. Withal mild as a lamb, tho’ daggers always about his person.’ This was Giovanni Battista Falcieri, Byron’s former manservant.¹⁵

The presence of Clay [observed Robert Blake in his excellent account of Disraeli’s tour] removed whatever restraining influence Meredith may have had on Disraeli. He now behaved with a flamboyance, conceit and affectation which did him no good, though he seems to have been wholly unaware of this in his letters.¹⁶

‘Affectation tells here even better than wit,’ Disraeli wrote from Malta. ‘Yesterday at the racket court [as I was] sitting in the gallery among strangers, the ball entered, slightly struck me, and fell at my feet. I picked it up and, observing a young rifleman excessively stiff, I humbly requested him to forward its passage into the court, as I really had never thrown a ball in my life. This incident has been the general subject of conversation at all the messes today.’¹⁷

It is most doubtful that this kind of affectation created such ‘a good impression’ as Disraeli thought it did; or that his collection of pipes – his ‘Turkish pipe six feet long with an amber mouth piece’, his Meerschaum, and his ‘most splendid Dresden green china pipe’ – helped him to become the ‘greatest smoker in Malta’. Nor can his flamboyant clothes have elicited the admiration he liked to suppose, consisting, as one outfit did, of ‘the costume of a Greek pirate, a blood-red shirt with silver studs as big as shillings, an immense scarf or girdle full of pistols and daggers, a red cap, red slippers, blue broad-striped jacket and trousers…Excessively wicked.’¹⁸ This ensemble, so James Clay assured him, helped him to achieve a ‘complete and unrivalled triumph’, a description more suited to Disraeli’s own opinion of his success than to Clay’s. Indeed, Clay, who later became an authority on whist and Member of Parliament for Hull, gave Sir William Gregory, an Irish Member, the impression that Disraeli on Malta had been an object of derision and distaste rather than admiration.

‘It would not have been possible to have found a more agreeable, unaffected companion when they were by themselves,’ Gregory wrote. ‘But when they got into society, his coxcombry was intolerable…He made himself so hateful to the officers’ mess that, while they welcomed Clay, they ceased to invite “that damned bumptious Jew boy” who, when he had been invited, turned up in Andalusian dress.’¹⁹

William Meredith said that when Disraeli ‘paid a round of visits’, he would do so in his ‘white trousers, and a sash of all the colours in the rainbow. In this wonderful costume he paraded all round Valetta, followed by one-half of the population, and, as he himself said, putting a complete stop to all business. He, of course, included the Governor [Sir Frederick Ponsonby] and Lady Emily in his round to their no small astonishment.’

Yesterday I called on Ponsonby [Disraeli told his father]. I flatter myself that he passed through the most extraordinary quarter of an hour of his existence. I gave him no quarter and at last made our nonchalant Governor roll on the sofa, from his risible convulsions. Then I jumped up, remembered that I must be sadly breaking into his morning, and was off, making it a rule always to leave with a good impression. He pressed me not to go. I told him I had so much to do! I walked down the Strada Reale, which is nearly as good as Regent Street, and got five invitations to dinner (literally a fact). When I arrived home I found an invitation for Tuesday.²⁰

At the beginning of October 1830, Clay and his friends sailed for Cyprus, a ‘most lovely island’, in a chartered yacht, the Susan, a name which, so Disraeli said, was a ‘bore, but, as we can’t alter it, we have painted it out’; and from there they sailed for Prevesa, now in Greece, at that time part of the Turkish empire.

They then travelled overland to Arta, where Disraeli was deeply moved by the muezzin call from the minaret. Here the Albanian governor provided the travellers with an escort to take them on to Yanina, where they were presented to the Grand Vizier before whom Disraeli ‘bowed with all the nonchalance of St James’s’.

The Grand Vizier was ‘a little, ferocious-looking, shrivelled, careworn man, placidly dressed with a brow covered with wrinkles, and with a countenance clouded with anxiety and thought’.

The English travellers, who had been shown into his divan ‘ahead of a crowd of patient supplicants in the ante-chamber’, were then taken to the Grand Vizier’s son, who was the very reverse of his father – ‘incapable of affairs, refined in his manners, plunged in debauchery and magnificent in dress. Covered with gold and diamonds, he bowed to us with the ease of a Duke of Devonshire and said the English were the most polished of nations.’

I can give you no idea in a letter of all the Pashas and all the Agas that I have visited [Disraeli told Benjamin Austen]; all the pipes I smoked, all the coffee I sipped, all the sweetmeats I devoured…For a week I was in a scene equal to anything in the Arabian Nights – such processions, such dresses, such cortèges of horsemen, such caravans of camels, then the delight of being made much of by a man who was daily decapitating half the Province. Every evening we paid visits, attended reviews, and crammed ourselves with sweetmeats; every evening dancers and singers were sent to our quarters by the Vizier or some Pasha.²¹

Meredith gave a description of his friend’s costume on such occasions: ‘Figure to yourself a shirt entirely red with silver studs…green pantaloons with a velvet stripe down the sides, and a silk Albanian shawl with a long fringe of divers colours round his waist, red Turkish slippers and, to complete all, his Spanish jacket covered with embroidery and ribbons. Was this costume English or fancy dress? asked a little Greek Physician. He was told “Inglese e fantastico”.’²²

In an exceptionally long letter to his father, Disraeli gave an amusing description of a drunken evening during ‘this wondrous week in Albania’:

We ate; we drank; we ate with our fingers, we drank in a manner I never recollect – the wine was not bad but had it been poison the forbidden juice was such a compliment from a Moslemin that I must quaff it all…we quaffed it in rivers. The Bey called for the Brandy – unfortunately there was another bottle – we drank it all – the room turned round; the wild attendants who sat at our feet seemed dancing in strange and fantastic whirls; the Bey shook hands with me…he roared; I smacked him on the back. I remember no more. In the middle of the night I woke. I found myself sleeping on the divan, rolled up in its sacred carpet; the Bey had wisely reeled to the fire.²³

‘We sailed from Prevesa through the remaining Ionian islands,’ Disraeli continued his account of his travels. ‘A cloudless sky, a summer atmosphere, and sunsets like the neck of a dove, completed all the enjoyment which I anticipated from roving in a Grecian sea. We were obliged, however, to keep a sharp lookout for Pirates, who are all about again – we exercised the crew every day with muskets, and their increasing prowess, and our own pistol exercise, kept up our courage.’²⁴

I am quite a Turk [he wrote to Benjamin Austen], wear a turban, smoke a pipe six feet long and squat on a divan…I find the habits of this calm and luxurious people entirely agree with my own preconceived opinions of propriety, and I detest the Greeks more than ever. I do not find mere travelling on the whole very expensive, but I am ruined by my wardrobe…When I was presented to the Grand Vizier I made up such a costume from my heterogeneous wardrobe that the Turks who are mad on the subject of dress were utterly astounded.

In Athens, Disraeli and his companions were, so he claimed, the first Englishmen to visit the Acropolis, which had been shut up for nine years. ‘Athens is still in the power of the Turks,’ he wrote, ‘but the ancient remains have been respected. The Parthenon and the other temples which are in the Acropolis, have necessarily suffered during the siege, but the injury is only in the detail; the general effect is not marred…The temple of Theseus looks, at a short distance, as if it were just finished by Pericles.’ ‘Of all that I have visited,’ he added, ‘nothing has more completely realized all that I imagined and all that I could have wished than Athens.’²⁵

All the houses in the city were, however, roofless and there were ‘hundreds of shells and cannon balls lying among the ruins’; while the surrounding country was desolate.

Happy are we to get a shed for nightly shelter [Disraeli told his father, having made an excursion to Marathon] and never have been fortunate enough to find one not swarming with vermin. My sufferings in this way are great. And the want of sleep from these vermin, and literally I did not sleep a wink the whole time I was out, is very bad, as it unfits you for daily exertion…We found a wild boar just killed at a little village and purchased half of it – but it is not as good as Bradenham pork.²⁶

He was thankful when the wind changed and the Susan was able to set sail for Constantinople, of which he caught sight just as the sun was setting on 10 December 1830. ‘It baffled all description,’ he wrote of that first sight of it: ‘an immense mass of buildings, cupolas, cypress groves and minarets’. He felt an excitement which, so he said, he thought was dead.²⁷

In Constantinople they found the British Ambassador, Sir Robert Gordon, welcoming, hospitable and – Disraeli was pleased to discover – as hostile to the Greeks as he was himself. A cousin of Byron and a future ambassador extraordinary in Vienna, Gordon was clearly delighted to have Disraeli and his friends as his guests and was much put out when they left after a visit lasting six weeks, pressing them to stay longer, offering them rooms in the embassy and, so Disraeli said, most reluctantly taking leave of them ‘in a pet’.

He made the most of them, however, while they were there:

Tell Ralph we are very gay here [Disraeli reported to his father], nothing but masquerade balls and diplomatic dinners. The Ambassador has introduced us everywhere. We had the most rollicking week at the Palace [the embassy] with romping of the most horrible description and things called ‘games of forfeits’. Gordon, out of the purest malice, made me tumble over head and heels!

Since descriptions were ‘an acknowledged bore’, he said that he would leave Constantinople to his father’s imagination. But he did describe it, all the same. He wrote of the bazaar, ‘perhaps a square mile of arcades intersecting each other in all directions and full of every product of the empire from diamonds to dates’.

Here in Constantinople [he went on, ready as always to describe an exotic wardrobe] every people have a characteristic costume. Turks, Greeks, Jews and Armenians are the staple population…The Armenians wear round and very unbecoming black caps and robes, the Jews a black hat wreathed with a white handkerchief, the Greeks black turbans. The Turks indulge in all manner of costume. The meanest merchant in the Bazaar looks like a sultan in an Eastern fairy tale. This is mainly to be ascribed to the marvellous brilliancy of their dyes…The Sultan [Mahmoud II] dresses like a European and all the young men have adopted the fashion. You see the young Turks in uniforms which would not disgrace one of our crack cavalry regiments, and lounging with all the bitterness of Royal illegitimates.²⁸

What he called his ‘Turkish prejudices’ were ‘very much confirmed’ by his visit to Turkey. The life of the people greatly accorded with his taste, which was naturally ‘somewhat indolent and melancholy’, he told his friend, the novelist, Edward Lytton Bulwer. ‘To repose on voluptuous ottomans and smoke superb pipes, daily to indulge in the luxury of a bath which requires half a dozen attendants for its perfection; to court the air in a carved caique, by shores which are a perpetual scene; this is, I think, a far more sensible life than all the bustle of clubs, all the boring of drawing-rooms, and all the coarse vulgarity of our political controversies…I mend slowly but I mend.’²⁹

In letters to his father, he was more specific about his health which, he said, continued improving. ‘In fact,’ he wrote, ‘I hope the early spring will return me to Bradenham in a very different plight to that in which I left it. I can assure you that I sigh to return altho’ in very agreeable company; but I have seen and done enough in this way.’

Prevented by contrary winds from landing on Rhodes, the Susan sailed on to Cyprus, where Disraeli and Clay spent a day, Meredith having now left them to go to Egypt. From Cyprus they went on to Jaffa and thence made the tiring and potentially hazardous journey on horseback to Jerusalem, where, since there were no hotels or inns in the Holy City, Disraeli and his party had to stay in the monastery of St Salvador, where they were ‘admitted into a court with all [their] horses and camels…and warmly welcomed by the most corpulent friars’ Disraeli had ever seen waddling around them.³⁰

On their second night, one of the ‘best houses in Jerusalem’ was allotted to the visitors by these fat and jolly Franciscan friars who sent them provisions every day.

‘I could write half a dozen sheets on this week, the most delightful in all our travels,’ Disraeli recorded. ‘We dined every day on the roof of our house by moonlight and of course visited the Holy Sepulchre…an ingenious imposture of a comparatively recent date.’

Surprised at the number of remains in Jerusalem – tho’ some more ancient than Herod [Disraeli noted briefly]. The tombs of the Kings very fine. Weather delicious – mild summer heat…received visits from the Vicar General of the Pope, the Spanish Prior etc. Never more delighted in my life.

Disraeli also climbed the Mount of Olives and, so he said, ‘endeavoured to enter [the Mosque of Omar] at the hazard of my life. I was detected and surrounded by a horde of turbaned fanatics, and escaped with difficulty…I caught a glorious glimpse of splendid courts and light airy gates of Saracenic triumph, flights of noble steps, long arcades, and interior gardens, where silver fountains spouted their tall streams amid the taller cypresses.’³¹

It is impossible to say when I will be home [Disraeli wrote to his sister after his arrival in Egypt from Palestine], but I should think in three months. From Alexandria…I crossed the desert to Rosetta. It was a twelve hours job, and the whole way we were surrounded by a mirage of the most complete kind. I was perpetually deceived and always thought I was going to ride into the sea. At Rosetta I first saw the mighty Nile with its banks richly covered with palm groves.

In Egypt he met Mehemit Ali, the Pasha, who discussed with him the idea of introducing parliamentary democracy into the country. ‘I will have as many Parliaments as the King of England himself,’ the Pasha said to him. ‘But I have made up my mind, to prevent inconvenience, to elect them myself.’³²

From Rosetta, Disraeli sailed up the Nile to Cairo and then on towards Thebes. And one day, as he wandered away from the moored boat, the sky darkened as columns of sand suddenly appeared and came rapidly towards him.

I rushed to the boat with full speed [he wrote] but barely quick enough. I cannot describe the horror and confusion. It was a Simoom [a hot, dry, suffocating sand-wind]. It was the most awful sound I ever heard. Five columns of sand taller than the Monument [the column, 202 feet high, built in ‘perpetual remembrance’ of the Great Fire of London] emptied themselves on our party.

Every sail was rent to pieces, men buried in the earth. Three boats sailing along overturned…the wind, the screaming, the shouting, the driving of the sand were enough to make you mad. We shut all the windows of the cabin, and jumped into bed, but the sand came in like fire.³³

Having returned to Cairo, Disraeli and Clay remained there, waiting for Meredith to come back from a trip he had made on his own to Thebes, which Disraeli described in irritation as ‘the unseen relics of some unheard-of cock-and-bull city’; and, in Cairo, soon after his return to them, Meredith fell gravely ill with smallpox and died on 19 July 1831.

Disraeli reported the death in a distracted letter to his father: ‘I would willingly have given up my life for his.’

Oh! my father, why do we live? The anguish of my soul is great. Our innocent lamb [Sarah, Meredith’s fiancée] is stricken. Save her, save her. I will come home directly…I wish to live only for my sister…I think of her day and night…My dear father, I do not know whether I have done all that is necessary. I have sent a courier to Clay [who had gone on to Alexandria to make arrangements for their homeward journey]. Mr Botta [Paul Emile Botta, the son of the historian, a physician, the inspiration for the character of Count Marigny in Disraeli’s ‘Psychological Romance’, Contarini Fleming of 1832, and ‘the most philosophical mind’ that Disraeli had ever come across] has been very kind to me as I could not sleep and dared not be alone and my anguish was overwhelming…It was some satisfaction that I was with our friend to the last. Oh! my father, I trust a great deal to you and to my dear mother.³⁴

‘Oh, my sister, in this hour of overwhelming affliction my thoughts are only for you,’ he wrote to his ‘own Sa’. ‘Alas! my beloved, if you are lost to me where am I to fly for refuge? I have no wife, I have no betrothed…Live then, my heart’s desire, for one who has ever loved you, and who would have cheerfully yielded his own existence to have saved you the bitterness of this letter.’^*35

‘If I cannot be to you all of our best friend,’ he added, ‘at least we will feel that life can never be a blank while illumined by the pure & perfect Love of a Sister and a Brother.’³⁶

Sarah did, thereafter, live for her brother and the family, and, in return, Disraeli’s affection for her remained deep and constant.

‘I believe he never entirely got over his sense of suffering at the crushing disappointment of her early hopes,’ his friend Sir Philip Rose, said; ‘and, amid the many stirring incidents of his eventful life, the death-bed scene at Cairo was not seldom recalled. He rarely spoke either of his sister or of Meredith, but that was his habit where his feelings were deeply concerned…On the first occasion of his becoming Prime Minister I remember saying to him, “If only your sister had been alive now to witness your triumph, what happiness it would have given her”, and he replied, “Ah, poor Sa, poor Sa! We’ve lost our audience. We’ve lost our audience.”’³⁷

Leaving Clay to finish their planned tour, Disraeli sailed for Malta, where he intended to take the earliest possible boat to England after enduring a month’s quarantine on the island. Clay was also obliged to spend a tedious quarantine in the Lazaretto in Venice, where he wrote a characteristically breezy letter to Disraeli:

Many returns of this day [21 December 1831, Disraeli’s twenty-seventh birthday]…Between us we have contrived to stumble on all the thorns with which (as Mr Dickens, the Winchester Porter, was wont poetically to observe) Venus guards her roses; for while you were cursing the greater evils [of some venereal disease] I contrived to secure the minor viz. a gleet [a form of gonorrhoea] from over-exertion and crabs [pediculus pubis, crab-lice]. The former I richly earned and it wore itself out, the latter was quickly cured and I am in high cue for a real debauch in Venice.

Yesterday being my birthday I drank our very good health…After dinner a capital batch of letters (yours included) arrived…I drank and drank again and read and re-read my letters until it became impossible to distinguish one correspondent from another. On reading what I thought was your hand-writing I found an exhortation to marry and settle, and when I took up, as I believed, a letter from my mother, I read that ‘Mercury [hydrargyrum, salts of mercury then prescribed for the treatment of syphilis] had succeeded to Venus’ – a most extraordinary communication from an elderly gentlewoman.³⁸

While Disraeli’s family naturally and strongly disapproved of James Clay, they were also concerned when he took up with another young man of equally dubious reputation, Henry Stanley, brother of Edward Stanley, the future fourteenth Earl of Derby and Conservative Prime Minister.

Having become friendly on the voyage home from Malta to Fal-mouth, Disraeli and Henry Stanley travelled by coach together from Cornwall to London, where they parted. Disraeli spent two or three nights at the Union Hotel, where he commonly stayed when in London. Stanley, so it was supposed, went home to Knowsley Hall. But he did not arrive there, and his family became worried. It was known that he had gone to London with Disraeli, who was asked to help find him; and he was eventually discovered in a gambling house kept by one Effie Bond.

Disraeli owed Bond money; and it was suspected by Henry Stanley’s elder brother, Edward, that, while pretending to look for Henry, Disraeli was, in fact, working with the unscrupulous Effie Bond to part the impressionable young man from his money.

Edward Stanley consequently conceived ‘a strong prejudice against Disraeli’, wrote Sir Philip Rose, ‘and it was not until the force of public and political affairs [when Edward Stanley had succeeded his father as Earl of Derby] induced them to become associates that his hostility disappeared. It is probable that his feeling was rather the resentment of a proud man at a stranger having become mixed up in his family secrets, and cognizance of a brother’s misconduct, than any real distrust or belief that his brother had been led into difficulties by Disraeli…The letters from Lord Stanley and Colonel Long, his brother-in-law, conclusively show that they had no complaint against Disraeli, and not only acquitted him of all blame, but were grateful for his interference and aid, and the Hon. Henry’s own letters show that Disraeli had given him the best and most disinterested advice.’³⁹

Having returned to Bradenham, Disraeli settled down to work ‘like a Tiger’. He had to undergo another ‘six weeks’ course of Mercury’ for his venereal complaint, as he told Benjamin Austen, and this had ‘pulled [him] down’. But his head was ‘all right’; and he felt quite well again.⁴⁰ Indeed, despite the ‘overwhelming catastrophe’ of Meredith’s death, he was, he said, in ‘famous condition – better indeed than [he] had ever been in [his life] and full of hope and courage’.

His journey, as his biographer, W.F. Monypenny, commented:

proved a capital event in his life and had marked effects on his whole subsequent career, both literary and political. It not only enlarged his experience beyond that of most young Englishmen of his day, but, what was even more important to one of his peculiar temperament, it helped to give definite purpose and significance to that Oriental tendency in his nature which, vaguely present before, was henceforth to dominate his imagination and show itself in nearly all his achievements. We can see the influence of the Eastern journey in Contarini Fleming, in Alroy, in Tancred, and in Lothair; but we can see it not less clearly in the bold stroke of policy which laid the foundations of English ascendancy in Egypt, in the act which gave explicit form to the conception of an Indian Empire with the sovereign of Great Britain at its head, and in the settlement imposed on Europe at the Berlin Congress [of 1878].⁴¹