Читать книгу Disraeli: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 13

‘I may commit many follies in life, but I never intend to marry for “love”.’

EARLIER THAT YEAR, IN FEBRUARY 1834, while staying at The Grange, Southend, Disraeli had made one of his rare excursions into the hunting field.

‘I hunted the other day with Sir Henry Smythe’s hounds,’ he told his sister with characteristic and not altogether mocking self-congratulation, ‘and although not in scarlet was the best mounted man in the field…I stopped at nothing. I gained great kudos, having nearly killed an Arabian mare in a run of 30 miles.’^*1

This Arabian mare belonged to Henrietta, Lady Sykes, with whom he had been much taken when he had met her in a box at the opera on 18 May 1833. Also in the box was Lady Charlotte Bertie, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of the Earl of Lindsay, who noted in her diary that Disraeli was ‘wild, enthusiastic and very poetical…The brilliance of my companion affected me and we ran on about poetry and Venice and Baghdad and Damascus and my eye lit up and my cheek burned.’²

Disraeli was clearly attracted to this young woman and, a few days later, asked his sister if she would like her as a sister-in-law. She was, he said, ‘very clever, [had] £25,000, and [was] domestic. As for “love” and beauty 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 of infidelity.’³

Sarah did not like the idea of Lady Charlotte as a sister-in-law and thought it unlikely that she had as much money as her brother supposed. She suggested that he should make another proposal to William Meredith’s sister, Ellen, whom he had already asked and by whom he had been refused.

For the moment, however, while looking about for a suitable wife, Disraeli was content to have a married woman as a mistress; and his family supposed that he had found such a mistress in Clara Bolton, the wife of his doctor, George Buckley Bolton.

Mrs Bolton was another woman whom Sarah did not care for. Nor did other women who knew her, for she was considered socially pretentious, conceited, devious and unprincipled, though by no means stupid, while her husband, the doctor, was ill-bred, cocky and, it was supposed, as a mari complaisant, not above accepting money from his wife’s admirers. These admirers, so Clara Bolton was anxious to assure Disraeli, were many and diverse, not a ‘formal set’, she told him, listing their names. ‘I give them nothing to do,’ she said, ‘& nothing to eat and yet they come.’ Disraeli often went. ‘We all agree,’ he said, ‘it’s better than a club.’

The other woman, Henrietta Sykes, who was in the box at the theatre with Lady Charlotte Bertie, was the wife of Sir Francis Sykes, the third baronet, owner of Basildon Park in Berkshire as well as a town house in Upper Grosvenor Street. His grandfather had become extremely rich in the service of the East India Company; his father, a Member of Parliament, had married a daughter of the first Lord Henniker. His wife was the daughter of Henry Villebois of Martham Hall, Norfolk, also a rich man, a partner in the brewery firm of Truman and Hanbury. Lady Sykes herself, according to her friend, Lady Charlotte Bertie, was ‘a fine woman and very pleasant and good-natured’. She was also extremely pretty, wilful, impetuous, sensual and susceptible. She had four young children.

The prospect of meeting this woman, with whom her brother had soon fallen in love, elicited a worried letter from Sarah Disraeli when her brother proposed bringing her down to Bradenham:

I am so afraid it will rain & then Lady Sykes will die of ennui, for how can we amuse her of an evening as it is, & then the long mornings too. She will hate us. Let us know as well as you can what établissement travels with her…

Send the claret directly as we want that at any rate & it will not be good if it have not time to settle…I write in the greatest haste⁴…I am somewhat nervous at the idea of entertaining our visitors whose tastes I cannot even guess at.⁵

The next day Disraeli replied:

I received yours this morning. We come on Saturday but at what hour very doubtful. I sho[uld] think about 3. Lady Sykes will venture to bring her only daughter [Eva] aged three. But no nurserymaid. I assured her my mother wo[uld] not disapprove of a pretty child. For the rest her page and soubrette, [Isabella Margaret] Munro…I shall send my groom with my horse in Munro’s gig. Be not alarmed about amusement; our guests are indolent and loungy.⁶

Sarah need not have been so worried. Apparently the visit was not such a strain as she had feared it might be; and, when Lady Sykes and her lover returned to London, they were evidently more deeply in love than ever. She wrote him a series of passionate letters assuring him of her devotion, telling him how much she missed him when he left her, how she could not restrain her tears. ‘If you knew how desolate this house is – your white stick on the sopha, a ghost of departed joy…’

It is the night Dearest the night that we used to pass so happily together…I cannot sleep. I love you…I love you indeed I do…The dear head, is it better? That it were pillowed on my bosom for ever. I would be such an affectionate old Nurse to my child and kiss and soothe every pain…Good Angels guard my dearest. A thousand and a thousand kisses – Good night. Sleep and dream of – your Mother.⁷ Love me, my Soul, love me and be assured that the measure of my idolatry for you is full to the brim [she wrote in another letter]. Every breath I draw is yours, even now your kisses live on my lips and face and I feel the passion of your embrace…Best beloved, do you love me? Do you indeed? How often have I asked you that question, how often been soothed by your assurance of devotion to me. I do not doubt you, oh no, I dare not – it would drive me mad.⁸

When Sir Francis heard of his wife’s affair with Disraeli – being told of it, Lady Sykes supposed, by Mrs Bolton, with whom Sir Francis himself was by now having an affair – he forbade his wife ever to see Disraeli again.

Lady Sykes had no doubt as to how to deal with her husband and the woman she called ‘Madame’. She stormed round to Mrs Bolton’s house, where she found her husband’s carriage waiting in the street outside. ‘I walked in [she told Disraeli] sans knocking and up to the drawing room sans being announced. Fancy their consternation. I really thought Francis would have fainted.’

‘We are victorious,’ she closed her version of this encounter. ‘Madame cried and wrung her hands. F[rancis] cried and begged me to be merciful. I did not cry and had apologies from both.’

Mrs Bolton, who had once, so she said, received letters from Disraeli, protesting ‘undying, unspeakable, obligation’, now told Lady Sykes that she had heard on excellent authority that no one would visit her any more and that Disraeli himself would leave her. ‘Indeed, he has left you already,’ she said, ‘I know him well. He is everywhere despised.’

Ignoring such outbursts from Mrs Bolton, Henrietta Sykes agreed to go for a few days with her husband to France, whence she wrote to Disraeli: ‘Think of the happy ten minutes on the sopha…and how delicious would be…the happiness of returning to the peaceful cot and reposing in each other’s arms. It would be bliss, bliss beyond compare, and hope whispers it will be realized – most idolized, I love you, I adore you, I worship you with fond idolatry.’⁹

On her return from the Continent, Disraeli left Bradenham almost immediately to see Henrietta again; and one day in London her father saw them together in the street and walked past, ignoring them: a slight which, in their absorption with each other, they did not notice. Mr Villebois, however, instructed one of Henrietta’s sisters to let her know that he would continue to ignore them until their intimacy ceased. His heart was ‘almost broken’ by the scandal, he said; and he trusted that she would end the disgraceful relationship.

‘I wrote back’, Henrietta told her lover, ‘to say…I was agonized by his displeasure but so long as Francis allowed me your society I should enjoy it.’¹⁰

The scandal which so distressed Mr Villebois was exacerbated when Disraeli accepted an invitation to stay with the Sykeses at Southend – where they had taken a house, Poulter’s Grange – Sir Francis having invited him on the implied condition that the Boltons were to stay there too. ‘I think…you will like the quiet of this place,’ Henrietta wrote. ‘The greatest drawback will be the damnable Boltons. They poison love, my greatest scource of enjoyment.’¹¹

Disraeli did not tell his sister where he was going and, when she found out, she was much distressed. ‘My dearest, why have you forgotten me?’ she wrote to him, care of the post office at Southend. ‘Will you come back next Saturday?’ ‘My dearest love,’ she wrote again the following day, ‘No letter again this morning. After you left me so unhappy I was sure you would not have failed to have kept your promise of writing to me if there was not something amiss. Pray send me a single line. We are so dull here.’ The next day Disraeli did reply to her letters, giving the excuse for not having been in touch with her before that he had been writing hard.

He certainly had need to earn money from his writing, to create, as he put it, ‘something great & lasting’ which would be profitable and, although he had by now dropped Benjamin Austen in his pursuit of more rewarding, distinguished and entertaining friends, he wrote to him asking for a further loan so that he could avoid ‘the cruelty’ of having his ‘power of creation marred at such a moment’.

Austen’s patience had worn too thin for this. ‘I am sorry to say, my dear Disraeli,’ he replied huffily, refusing the request, ‘that you have tried me too often.’ He relented, however, after having received an ingratiating letter from Disraeli, who assured him that there was ‘not a person in the world’ who would more readily hazard everything he valued to serve Austen and his wife. ‘I was so circumstanced last year that my acquaintance I utterly rejected…[My] relations I never went near, and I disregarded an entrance which offered itself to me to the most brilliant society of the metropolis.’ His debts, he added falsely, were ‘entirely and altogether electioneering debts’. Friends, he continued, were ‘not made every day…It is in youth only that these connections are formed, and yours was my last. Had the friend [William Meredith] who in his gloomier hours never found me wanting, been spared to me, I should not have been forced to write this humiliating letter! Farewell!’¹²

Mollified by this abject and misleading letter, Austen lent Disraeli £1,200 at 21/2; per cent. This, however, did not go far to alleviate his problems; and his financial affairs grew ever more complicated as his solicitor, Philip Rose, endeavoured to satisfy or, at the least, to quieten his numerous creditors by all manner of financial expedients. Loans were borrowed from such generous friends as D’Orsay, with whom he fell out when they were not repaid, while money was, so it seems, extracted from Sir Francis Sykes, whose mental state was becoming increasingly confused.

Struggling to finish Venetia, a novel based on the life of Byron, Disraeli told William Pyne, a rich solicitor, that he ‘found it difficult to command the Muse amidst all these vexations’. But he did contrive to command it, to finish Henrietta Temple, a novel inspired by his affair with Lady Sykes, which was published by Henry Colburn in 1837, the same year as Venetia. He also managed to survive all threats to have him incarcerated in a debtors’ prison, though coming close to arrest on more than one occasion and once at High Wycombe being driven to hide in a well to evade the sheriff’s officer.¹³

‘I am hourly, nay, every minute, annoyed by the coarse vulgarity of the one and the hypocrisy, the low cunning of the other,’ Henrietta Sykes wrote to Disraeli of the Boltons following his return to Bradenham, after he had spent a month at Southend. ‘I went into your room today, arranged your wardrobe, kissed the Bed, swallowed my tears and behaved as a heroine…Today’s letter was the kindest, dearest – write me many such.’¹⁴

It was not long before he had no need to do so, as Sir Francis went abroad for over two years; and Disraeli, by then on the best of terms with him, went with him to Harwich to see him off. They were now agreed about the perfidy of the Boltons: he was, in Sir Francis’s words, a ‘dreadful’ person; she filled him with ‘disgust’. Fortunately, she went to live alone in Rotterdam where she was, Sarah D’Israeli heard, the ‘object of much scandal’.

So, indeed, was Disraeli, who now spent much of his time, nights as well as days, in the Sykes’s house. He wrote in his diary, ‘What a happy or rather amusing society H[enrietta] and myself commanded this year. What Delicious little suppers after the Opera.’¹⁵

By now, however, Disraeli’s passion for Lady Sykes had begun to cool. He had grown tired of her cloying possessiveness, of receiving such letters as:

I swear I suffer the torments of the damned when you are away and although there is nothing I would not sacrifice to give you a moment’s enjoyment I cannot bear that your amusement should spring from any other source than myself…Are you angry, love, at my selfishness? You never answer questions and I sometimes think I bore you by writing…It appears an age since we parted and I would that we were never separated for a moment. Is it vain to suppose you would love me better and better the longer we were together?…I love you even to madness.

The affair lingered on, and continued to be the subject of scandalous stories, not only about Disraeli and Lady Sykes, but also about Henrietta and Lord Lyndhurst, the good-natured, indiscreet, gossiping and, to women, extremely attractive American-born former and future Lord Chancellor, with whom Disraeli – who described him as looking like ‘a high-bred falcon’ – was on the most friendly terms. Indeed, it was suggested that, as a means of forwarding his political career, Disraeli encouraged Lady Sykes to have an affair with Lyndhurst who, though contentedly married to a Jewish wife, had not the least objection. Nor, indeed, had Lady Sykes, who told Disraeli that she could make Lyndhurst do as she liked, ‘so whatever arrangement you think best tell me & and I will perform it’.

I can well remember the scandal in the country at this connexion [wrote Sir Philip Rose], and especially at the visit of Lady Sykes to Bradenham accompanied by Lord L[yndhurst] and the indignation aroused in the neighbourhood at D. having introduced his reputed mistress and her Paramour to his Home and made them the associates of his Sister as well as of his father and mother. It did him much harm at the time and to show how unfavourable impressions linger long afterwards I have had it thrown in my teeth by influential county people within very recent years [the late 1870s and early 1880s] that this was an act which would never be forgotten and which all D’s subsequent career could never obliterate.^*16

In the summer of 1834, Lady Sykes received what she called a ‘disagreeable’ letter from her sister warning her that she would be socially ostracised if her relationship with Disraeli continued. She advised her to go to Norfolk to stay with their father at Martham Hall. Lady Sykes declined to do this; but at last she did agree to go abroad with Lyndhurst and some members of his family. She ‘liked L. very much,’ she told Disraeli. ‘He is very good natured’ but ‘only thought of driving away care’. He was also ‘a perfect fool where women are concerned’.¹⁷

Disraeli was asked to go abroad with them but he declined the invitation.

It was not long before Lady Sykes had found another lover in the attractive, good-looking, gregarious Irish painter, Charles Dickens’s friend, Daniel Maclise. But when she and Maclise were discovered in bed together, Sir Francis threatened proceedings for what was known as ‘criminal conversation’ and inserted a paragraph in the Morning Chronicle giving notice that ‘HENRIETTA SYKES the wife of me SIR FRANCIS SYKES Baronet hath committed ADULTERY with DANIEL MACLISE…Portrait and Picture Painter (with whom she was found in bed at my house)…’¹⁸ Proceedings were not pursued, however, because of the other scandalous matters which would inevitably have come to light, including a story that £2,000, which had been paid to Lady Sykes in excess of her allowance, had somehow ‘found its way into Disraeli’s pocket’.¹⁹

Lady Sykes was disgraced and no longer seen in polite society in London. Disraeli, loyal to past friends, wrote her a letter of sympathy, to which she replied: ‘I regret that I should have awakened feelings of bygone years…Whatever may be my present sufferings I have brought them on myself & no one can judge more harshly of my conduct for the last 2 months than I…I thank God no one can reproach me of anything but romantic folly…I cannot think for I am distracted & feel as if there were no resting place on earth for me.’

Her life in society was over, and in May 1846 the death of the widow of Sir Francis Sykes was only briefly noticed in the newspapers.

What is apparently the last letter she wrote to Disraeli was very different from those she had written in the torridity of their affair:

What can I say sufficient to convey to you my deep admiration of your book [Henrietta Temple: A Love Story] and the extreme pleasure I felt in reading it. You know I am not very eloquent in expressing my feelings, therefore I must fail to convey to you a tythe part of the extreme gratification I have in your brilliant success…It is possible that I may go abroad with Francis – he is perfectly recovered and tolerably kind to me.²⁰