Disraeli: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ THE BEGINNING OF JUNE 1832, Disraeli went down from London to High Wycombe to begin his canvass of the constituency. The sitting members were Sir Thomas Baring, the financier, and the Hon. Robert John Smith, Lord Carrington’s son and heir who lived at Wycombe Abbey on the outskirts of the town, in which he had much influence, and who later became known as ‘glass-bottom Carrington’ because of his idée fixe that ‘an honourable part of his person was made of glass, so that he was afraid to sit thereon, and during the whole of his uneventful life, he persistently refused to sit whenever it was possible by any exercise of ingenuity to stand up or lie down’.¹

      Having declared himself a Radical, Disraeli told Benjamin Austen that he took with him ‘strong recommendatory epistles’ from those stalwarts on the left, Daniel O’Connell, Joseph Hume and Francis Burdett. A few days later he wrote again to Austen, dating his letter from the Red Lion, the inn, now demolished, that stood in the High Street with a statute of a red lion on the portico: ‘I write you a hurried note after a day’s hard canvass. Whigs, Tories and Radicals, Quakers, Evangelicals, Abolition of Slavery, Reform, Conservatism, Corn Laws – here is hard work for one who is to please all parties. I make an excellent canvasser.’²

      We are hard at it [he added in a letter to Mrs Austen]. Sir Thomas [Baring] you know has resigned [in order to contest a seat in Hampshire]. His son was talked of; I have frightened him off… Yesterday Colonel [Charles] Grey [son of the Prime Minister] came down with a hired mob and a band. Never was such a failure. After parading the town with his paid voices, he made a stammering speech of ten minutes from his phaeton. All Wycombe was assembled. Feeling it was the crisis, I jumped up on the portico of the Red Lion and gave it to them for an hour and 1/4. I can give you no idea of the effect. I made them all mad. A great many absolutely cried. I never made so many friends in my life or converted as many enemies. All the women are on my side and wear my colours, pink and white. The Colonel returned to town in the evening absolutely astounded out of his presence of mind; on dit never to appear again…If he comes I am prepared for him.³

      Prone as Disraeli was to hyperbole, there seems no doubt that his speech, so much more fluent and dramatic than Grey’s, was well received, and that he was loudly cheered when, pointing to the head of the red lion on the inn’s portico, he said that when the poll was declared he would be there, and pointing to the tail, that his opponent would be there. He did not, however, convert a majority of those few men who were entitled to vote, since, although the Reform Bill had just become law, voting in this election was still confined to the names on the old register. When the result of the poll was announced, he had gathered but twelve votes; his opponent had twenty-three.⁴

      Defiant in defeat, he made another long speech which almost resulted in a duel with Lord Nugent, a local magnate and convinced Whig, who considered himself insulted by him. More temperate and carefully reasoned was the address he issued on 3 December as an opening blast in his campaign in the election of the following year and in which he declared that he came forward once again, this time ‘wearing the badge of no party and the livery of no faction’.

      In a speech made after a dinner given for him by his supporters, he declared, ‘I care not for party. I stand here without party. I plead the cause of the people.’ He was ‘a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad’.⁵

      So confident was he of victory this time that he ordered a chair to be made in his electioneering colours so that he could be carried in triumph through the streets of the town by his jubilant supporters. But the electorate did not choose to have it so;^* and once again he was to be disappointed: on this second occasion Robert John Smith gained 179 votes, Colonel Grey 140 and Disraeli 119.

      He did not accept his defeat gracefully: he declared that had ‘he let money fly’, he ‘would have come in’. ‘The election or rather contest did not cost me £80…and Grey not short of £800.’⁶

      On 7 February, the disappointed candidate ‘went to the House of Commons to hear Bulwer [Radical Member for St Ives] adjourn the House’. ‘I was there yesterday, during the whole debate,’ he told Sara Austen. ‘Bulwer spoke, but he is physically disqualified as an orator; and, in spite of all his exertions, never can succeed…Between ourselves, I could floor them all. This entre nous; I was never more confident of anything than that I could carry everything before me in that House. The time will come…Grey spoke highly of my oratorical powers. Bulwer said he never heard “finer command of words”.’⁷

      Disappointed but not cast down by his first forays into the political world, Disraeli plunged once more into the social world of London. He remained, of course, an apparently conceited dandy; but his underlying seriousness and his conversational gifts now became more widely recognized. He was a ‘very handsome young man’, in the opinion of Henry Layard, Sara Austen’s nephew, ‘with a countenance in which beauty of feature and intellectual expression were strikingly combined’.⁸ He was also, Layard might have added, still excessively self-regarding. His letters to his sister continued to assure her of his social success:

      Yesterday I dined with the Nortons [the Hon. George and his wife, Caroline Norton]. It was her eldest brother’s birthday, who, she says, is the only respectable one of the family, and that is because he has a liver complaint. There were there the other brother Charles and the old Charles Sheridan, the uncle, and others. The only lady beside Mrs Norton, her sister Mrs Blackwood [later Lady Dufferin], also very handsome and very Sheridanic. She told me she was nothing. ‘You see Georgy’s the beauty, and Carry’s the wit, and I ought to be the good one but then I am not.’ I must say I liked her exceedingly; besides she knows all my works by heart and spouts whole pages…⁹

      In the evening came Lady St Maur, and anything so splendid I never gazed upon. Even the handsomest family in the world, which I think the Sheridans are, all looked dull…

      Mrs Norton sang and acted, and did everything that was delightful. Ossulston [son of the Earl of Tankerville] came in – a very fine singer, unaffected and good-looking. Old Mrs Sheridan – who, by the bye, is young and pretty, and authoress of Carwell – is my great admirer; in fact, the whole family have a very proper idea of my merits! and I like them all.¹⁰

      Disraeli was at his most splendid. He was wearing a ‘black velvet coat lined with satin, purple trousers with a gold band running down the outside seam,’ Lady Dufferin recalled, insisting that there was no exaggeration in the description, ‘a scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles, falling down to the tips of his fingers, white gloves with several brilliant rings outside them, and long black ringlets rippling down upon his shoulders’.¹¹

      Lady Dufferin also recalled Disraeli’s riposte to a remark of her ‘insufferable’ brother-in-law, the dissolute and pretentious barrister, the Hon. George Norton, who asked his guest to drink a particular kind of wine, saying he had never tasted anything so good before. Disraeli agreed that the wine was very good. ‘Well,’ said Norton, ‘I have got wine twenty times as good in my cellar.’ ‘No doubt, no doubt,’ said Disraeli, ‘but, my dear fellow, this is quite good enough for such canaille as you have got here today.’¹²

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