Читать книгу Disraeli: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 15

‘I trust there is no danger of my being nabbed.’

TOWARDS THE END OF JUNE 1835, Disraeli sent his sister a long description of a fancy-dress ball which ‘exceeded in splendour anything ever known in London’. His own dress he described as ‘admirable’.

Lady Chesterfield was a Sultana, and Mrs Anson a Greek, with her own hair lower than the calf of her leg. She was the most brilliant in the room…Lady Londonderry as Cleopatra was in a dress literally embroidered with emeralds and diamonds from top to toe. It looked like armor and she a Rhinoceros…

The finest thing is that at half past 2 Lyndhurst gave a supper in George Street to eighty of the supremest ton and beauty. You can conceive nothing more brilliant than his house illuminated with a banquet to a company so fancifully dressed…Lyndhurst looked like a French Marshal, Wilton was Philip 4th, and the Duke [of Wellington] lent him his Golden Fleece set in diamonds for the evening. The D of W spoke to me at the ball and said he did not know I was in London. He asked after my father.¹

Such entertainments as this supper given by Lord Lyndhurst in George Street did not prevent Disraeli from keeping ‘tolerably busy’, as he described himself in one of his arch and faintly flirtatious letters to the ‘fair and agreeable’ Lady Blessington, in October 1835.

In the summer, he had been writing articles anonymously for the Morning Post, vituperatively admonishing such personalities as the Attorney-General, John Campbell, that ‘base-born Scotchman, a son of the manse, that coarse Pict’, that ‘booing, fawning, jobbing progeny of haggis and cockaleekie’ who was to become the first Baron Campbell.

I have sent you the Morning Post every day, which is the only paper now read [Disraeli wrote to Sarah], and in whose columns some great unknown has suddenly risen, whose exploits form almost the sole staple of political conversation…The back numbers for the past week cannot be obtained for love or money, and the sale has increased nearly one third. All attempts at discovering the writer have been baffled, and the mystery adds to the keen interest which the articles excite.²

He had also been working on a book of two hundred pages which was to be published under the title A Vindication of the English Constitution in a Letter to a Noble and Learned Lord [Lord Lyndhurst] by ‘Disraeli the Younger’.

This book elicited from D’Israeli the Elder a characteristic letter to the author:

Your vulgar birthday [his thirty-first] was, it seems, last Monday, but your nobler political birthday has occurred this week, and truly, like the fable of old, you have issued into existence armed to the full panoply of the highest wisdom. You have now a positive name and a being in the great political world which you had not ten days ago. It is for you to preserve the wide reputation which I am positive is now secured. I never doubted your powers…You never wanted for genius, but it was apt in its fullness to run over. You have now acquired what many a great genius never could – a perfect style…All that now remains for you to do is to register ‘a vow from Heaven’ that you will never write anything inferior to what you have now written, and never write but on a subject which may call forth all your energies…Take care of your health – that is the only weak part which I fear about you.³

Disraeli the Younger told his sister that he sent a copy of the book to Sir Robert Peel even though he was ‘convinced that he would never notice, or even confess to having heard of it, being as you well know, by reputation the most jealous, frigid and haughty of men’. But, on the contrary, in his letter of acknowledgement, Peel wrote to say that, having been attracted by the name of the author as well as by some extracts which had appeared in ‘the public papers’, he had taken ‘the first opportunity of procuring a copy and had been gratified and surprised to find that a familiar and apparently exhausted topic could be treated with so much of original force of argument and novelty of illustration’.⁴

Disraeli showed the letter to Lord Lyndhurst, who told him that the praise was ‘much, considering the writer’. He himself considered the work ‘a masterly union of learning, skill, and eloquence’.

Such was not likely to be the opinion of the Whigs, whom Disraeli had so roundly condemned in his book; and the review of it in the Whig paper, the Globe, was as abusive as Disraeli was in his attack on that ‘obscure animal’, that ‘miserable poltroon’, that ‘craven dullard’, that ‘literary scarecrow’, that ‘mere thing stuffed with straw and rubbish’ which was the Globe’s editor.

Having attacked the Whigs in the Morning Post, Disraeli, writing under the pseudonym, Runnymede, now attacked the Whig government of Lord Melbourne in the pages of The Times with the warm approval and support of its editor, Thomas Barnes, who was, in Lord Lyndhurst’s opinion, ‘the most powerful man in the country’.

The Letters of Runnymede are the only things talked of in London [their author told Sarah D’Israeli with typical self-congratulation in January 1836]. The author is unknown and will probably so remain. One or two papers have foolishly ascribed them to me. There is certainly some imitation of my style and the writer is familiar with my works…The Letters of Runnymede are still making a great sensation [he continued a week or two later]. They are considered as rising regularly in power, and the two last, the characters of Lord J[ohn] R[ussell] [the Home Secretary] and O’C[onnell], are generally esteemed the most powerful.⁵

The virulence of the attack on O’Connell was typical of the whole. O’Connell was ‘a systematic liar and a beggarly cheat’. His public and private life were ‘equally profligate’. He had ‘committed every crime that does not require courage’. Lord John Russell was ‘a feeble Catiline [traitor]…an individual, who, on the principle that good vinegar is the corruption of bad wine, has been metamorphosed from an incapable author into an eminent politician’. Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, was the ‘Lord Fanny of diplomacy’ who combined the ‘smartness of an attorney’s clerk with the intrigue of a Greek of the lower Empire’; while the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne himself, was guilty of ‘sauntering over the destinies of a nation, and lounging away the glory of an Empire’.⁶

Even by the standards of the 1830s, these virulent assaults were considered strong meat; and some of the fiercer and more libellous phrases were softened by the editor’s pencil. But Disraeli, while pretending not to know the identity of ‘Runnymede’, was well satisfied with the effect which the letters produced. ‘Establish my character as a great political writer by the “Letters of Runnymede,”’ he noted in his diary, making a résumé of his progress that year. ‘My influence greatly increases from the perfect confidence of L[yndhurst] and my success as a political writer.’⁷

The letters to members of the Tory Opposition were as fulsome as those to members of the Government were vitriolic. ‘In your chivalry alone is our hope,’ ran the letter to Peel. ‘Clad in the panoply of your splendid talents and your spotless character we feel assured that you will conquer.’ ‘In a Peel, a Stanley, a Wellington and a Lyndhurst,’ another letter concluded, ‘the people of England recognize their fitting leaders.’⁸

In the spring of 1836, Disraeli had gone down to Lewes to speak in favour of a friend who was a candidate for the borough. His speech there was as effective as his writings had been in the past year; and when he sat down, according to The Times – which described him as ‘already well known for his literary talents and his opposition to the O’Connell influence in the Government’ – ‘the most deafening applause prevailed for the space of several minutes’.⁹

Despite this success, a subsequent energetic canvassing in support of the Conservative candidate in a by-election caused by the death of one of the members for Buckinghamshire, and a fine and witty speech delivered at a Conservative banquet in Aylesbury – which, reported in The Times, led Sarah to write, ‘You have succeeded in doing that which you so much desired, viz., to make a speech that would be talked of all over England’ – Disraeli was less concerned with politics in the late 1830s than with the problems occasioned by his debts.

These debts had now risen to over £20,000 (the equivalent in today’s money of about £600,000); and there seemed no way of settling them. There had been a time when he could always borrow from Benjamin Austen, but Austen had come to feel that Disraeli was no longer much interested in him now that he had found other more influential friends in smarter circles. When Disraeli asked for a loan of £1,200 in return for an assignment of his copyrights, Austen replied that, as Disraeli already owed him £300 – which he would not ask to be repaid for the moment – he did not feel able to lend him a further £1,200. Austen’s wife eventually persuaded her husband to change his mind; but when the time came to repay the money and Disraeli could not do so, Austen again, understandably, became extremely cross. Tired of receiving such letters as a characteristic one in which Disraeli expressed himself ‘mortified’ by being unable to redeem his pledge but he was ‘really TOO ILL’,¹⁰ Austen threatened to go to law, and so at length Disraeli was forced to appeal to his father. The debt was repaid. The friendship with the Austens, however, was irrevocably broken, and they were left suffering under what Sir Philip Rose described as ‘a morbid feeling of slight and neglect’.

Although the debts to Austen were settled at last, this was far from being the end of Disraeli’s financial distress. For a time he was helped by the solicitor, William Pyne, who performed ‘singular good services’. But by February 1836, the situation had once more become desperate. His creditors were now so clamorous that he was again reluctantly compelled to appeal to his father, to whom he did not care to reveal the full amount of his indebtedness – of which, in any case, he could hazard no more than a rough guess. In a painful interview at Bradenham he ‘ventured to say £2,000 might be required’. But this did not go far. He had to return for more. He was given more. Yet, even so, only the more importunate of the creditors were paid. Other debts still loomed and mounted. He found money, however, to bribe the sheriff’s officer.¹¹

Further debts were blithely contemplated. ‘On Saturday,’ he had written to Pyne in May 1836, ‘the “Carlton Chronicle”, a new weekly journal, will be started. I have been offered & have provisionally accepted half the proprietorship which…will require £500. This speculation may turn out & quickly a considerable property…I think I could scrape enough tog[eth]er. The object is CONSIDERABLE.’¹²

His debts apparently did not cause Disraeli any excessive worry. It was as though he accepted these as part of the necessary accoutrements of a man of fashion. A character in one of his novels expresses himself as being actually ‘fond of his debts’, one of ‘the two greatest stimulants in the world’, the other being youth. What would he be without them?