Sons, Servants and Statesmen (15 page)

Appropriately for a novelist, his letters were as full of sparkle as his conversation. While Gladstone’s memoranda had been so ponderous that Victoria generally required a summary (if not a dictionary) before she could fully grasp them, Disraeli’s were not only lively but succinct, very much to the point. Ponsonby noted with somewhat grudging admiration his ‘wonderful talent for writing in an amusing tone while seizing the points of an argument’. Rather more expansively, Lady Augusta Stanley told Lord Clarendon that ‘Dizzy writes daily letters to the Queen in his best novel style, telling her every scrap of political news dressed up to serve his own purpose, and every scrap of social gossip cooked to amuse her. She declares that she has never had such letters in her life, which is probably true, and that she never before knew
everything
!’
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On the occasion of the Queen’s fifty-sixth birthday in May 1875, Disraeli wrote to her that she lived ‘in the hearts and thoughts of many millions, though in none more deeply and more fervently than in the heart of him who, with humble duty, pens these spontaneous lines’.

How, it might be asked, did such a good judge of character as Queen Victoria accept or even tolerate his undisguised, almost excessive flattery, without wondering whether he might be making fun of her or suspecting he was being ‘false’? Yet she saw through the outward show and relished Disraeli’s extravagant style, seeing it as simply an expression of a romantic temperament, and aware that behind the façade he was scrupulously honest. There was no reason this most eloquent of courtiers could not be an equally serious-minded and trustworthy prime minister.

How much was she taken in by his extravagant compliments? Did she ever feel that he was teasing her, or merely encouraging her to come out of her shell? Though she lived a life of some seclusion in widowhood, it is difficult to imagine that she can have been so unworldly as not to take his elaborate, even exaggerated, courtliness at face value. One must assume that she was amused by the theatricality and good humour of his glowing phrases, though at the same time she knew better than to be lured into some world of make-believe more redolent of another age.

According to Algernon Cecil, Disraeli ‘pursued a primrose path of dalliance reminiscent of the Byronic age’. Though the showy waistcoats of his younger days might have gone by the time he assumed high office, ‘his language remained flowery and his flatteries were blatant’.
⁸
No matter how much he might pretend otherwise, the concept of a ‘Faery Queen’ was not one to be taken seriously. But no matter how blatant the flatteries were, Victoria clearly enjoyed and was amused by being on the receiving end as much as he relished bestowing such gilded compliments in the first place.

During the six years of his premiership, their association developed into something of an idyll, a partnership as much romantic as political. In 1874 the Queen was fifty-four and Disraeli sixty-nine. While others found the dumpy yet indomitably regal Queen Victoria in her black, elaborately bustled dresses and white widow’s veil intimidating, to Disraeli she was invariably charming. He appreciated her kindly eyes, her attractive voice, her silvery laugh, her graceful movements and the warmly welcoming smile on which so many others commented.

For her part, she found him attractive in her own way. This odd-looking figure could by no stretch of the imagination be called conventionally handsome, but to her he was undeniably poetic, exotic and far more interesting than a good-looking but boring man could ever be. His rouged cheeks, the single dyed curl on the forehead and the rings he wore over white gloves might make give him the appearance of a pantomime figure or a Lewis Carroll creation, but in the Queen’s eyes, such quirks probably made him even more captivating.

She would never spend more than a night or two at Buckingham Palace, and as Disraeli baulked at the idea of going north to Balmoral, their meetings were generally held at Windsor Castle and Osborne House. He was a reluctant visitor to Windsor, which he called ‘the Temple of the Winds’, and he did not share her passion for fresh air. Neither did he enjoy the formalities of the Court, and would say that all was well as long as he was allowed to keep to his room, or a morning walk, but
toilette
and evening mannerisms would destroy him. Balmoral, with its freezing temperatures and generally wet weather, he liked even less. Above all, he was not immune to Her Majesty’s occasionally exhausting company. ‘What nerve! What muscle! What energy!’ he groaned. ‘Her Minister is very deficient in all three.’
⁹
Yet he was always unfailingly charming whenever he was with her; as he was too much the courtier to betray his feelings, the Queen never knew that he was not delighted with each visit. Whether in the audience chamber or at the dinner-table, she adored his company. If she saw any of her children, usually Princess Helena or Prince Leopold, laughing at his table talk, she would immediately want to know what he was saying.

Disraeli may have thought Windsor chilly, but Osborne in poor weather was even worse, not least because of the usually turbulent waters of the Solent to cross. Once she was installed at her island home, even if it was raining, the Queen would be seated in her large parasol-tent, erected on a lawn below the house, where she was surrounded by her dogs, footmen, Highland attendants and black-clad ladies-in-waiting as she ate her breakfast and dealt with her despatch boxes – before receiving her Prime Minister.

Disraeli’s loss of his wife gave them something in common. After the death of Mary Anne, the Queen wrote to say that she knew exactly what he had lost and what he was suffering. To Lady Bradford he confessed that it was strange he always used to think that the Queen indulged in morbid sentiment, yet he was going through the same thing – and found it strangely irresistible. It is open to doubt whether either felt quite as much grief as they outwardly demonstrated, especially once the Queen had come through the first few years of widowhood, but there was comfort to be gleaned from the fact that their respective losses brought them even closer.

Unlike most of Victoria’s other prime ministers, Disraeli was well aware that she would respond to a personal approach, that he needed to reach beyond the invisible barrier of the sovereign’s status and the self-imposed dignity that she had acquired as necessary to her status. As such, he was one of the few men who dealt with her regularly and knew she had to be treated as a human being instead of as a deity on earth. More than most kings and queens, Victoria needed someone with whom she could be herself. Disraeli realised that her forbidding expression and stern demeanour hid a warm, even shy, personality, and that if handled with courtesy and tact, she would become a very different person. His efforts to woo her were as determined as his attempts to woo other women in the past, be they wives or widows and dowagers. While it was a discreet, respectful and innocent courtship, there was something of a whiff of courtship about it all the same.

Observers certainly suspected that Disraeli’s personal relationship with the Queen included an element of courtship, albeit innocent and respectful. It was never anything if not decorous, for the old widower was an incurable romantic, and his wife’s death probably allowed him a degree of licence to pursue his flirtation further than he might have done had she still been alive. His association with the Countess of Bradford was always more one of friendship and less an affair of the heart, and over the years he came to depend more on the Queen, who in a way epitomised the indulgent mother-figure he had long sought.

In his way, he must have believed that he was a little in love with the Queen, and he certainly never minded fostering the impression that the feeling was mutual. She was not in love with him, except in a strictly platonic sense, but the effect on her personality was very important. For the first time since the death of the Prince Consort, he made her feel desirable, ready for a little gentle flirtation, some joking and flattery, in a way which nobody else could, or would ever dare. It all proved invaluable in enhancing her personal self-esteem, as well as bringing into her life a sense of fantasy, a way to kindle her imagination. This make-believe world of the ‘Faery Queen’ which he created with gifts of primroses and snowdrops and violets added a sense of colour and gaiety to her existence. It was not exactly love, but something not unlike it.

Each February, sovereign and Prime Minister exchanged valentines. ‘He wishes he could repose on a sunny bank, like young Valentine in the pretty picture that fell from a rosy cloud this morn,’ he wrote on receiving one such card, ‘but the reverie of the happy youth would be rather different from his. Valentine would dream of the future, and youthful loves, and all under the inspiration of a beautiful clime! Lord Beaconsfield, no longer in the sunset, but the twilight of his existence, must encounter a life of anxiety and toil; but this, too, has its romance, when he remembers that he labours for the most gracious of beings!’
¹⁰
Some years later she told Lord Rosebery how touched she had been when Disraeli sent her a small trinket box, a heart transfixed by an arrow on one side, and the single word
Fideliter
on the other.

Queen Victoria’s platonic relationship with Disraeli never had any effect on her association with her Highland servant John Brown (see chapter 7). On the contrary, it was as if she had the best of both worlds. Her Prime Minister brought the poetical romance into her life, while the other made her feel secure at home. Between them they gave her all the moral support and attention she needed. One made her feel like a helpless widow, relying on him for protection, while the other made her feel like some desirable and almost mythical creature – an undoubted Queen.

Though they may not have realised it, Disraeli and Brown played complementary roles in drawing Queen Victoria out of her intense mourning for the Prince Consort. Although the passing of the years contributed, by the 1870s she was becoming less self-pitying and spent less time obsessively thinking about him, bewailing her loss. With these two very different men, her health, spirits and zest for life improved. Those who saw her exchanging banter with Disraeli during their regular audiences, or dancing with Brown at the ghillies’ balls at Balmoral, were proof enough that ‘the widow of Windsor’ had recovered her natural vitality. The Hanoverian high spirits were triumphing once more over Coburg melancholy.

Disraeli was never remotely jealous of her relationship with John Brown; he knew that the Scotsman’s presence did her good, and that she could divide her attentions, even her affections, between the two men. He understood how important the Highland servant was to her well-being, grateful that he had brought her out of her morbid frame of mind and her obsession with the memory of the Prince Consort. Maybe the Prime Minister had heightened her interest in life, but Brown had been the first to reawaken it. Unlike most other members of her circle, not least her family, Disraeli treated Brown with courtesy, and this only increased her admiration for this most understanding of prime ministers.

In foreign policy, the Queen and her Prime Minister were equally at one, not least on the question of the enhancement of British prestige. For too long, argued the Queen, people like Gladstone had allowed Britain to play a submissive, even negative, role, whereas Disraeli was ready to make a stand on behalf of British power in Europe.

Nevertheless, it was further eastwards that he achieved his most conspicuous feats. Monarch and Prime Minister were both well aware that if the Suez Canal was to come totally under French control, British commercial interests between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea would be at risk, as the waterway provided the shortest route between Britain and India, and over three-quarters of the ships using the canal were British. In November 1875 the Khedive of Egypt decided to sell his shares in the Canal, of which he owned nearly half, and he offered them to a French syndicate. Their acquisition would therefore have placed the Canal entirely in French hands.

Disraeli knew that the British government must buy the shares, and must do so quickly. Having rallied an unenthusiastic Cabinet behind him, he borrowed £4 million from the Rothschild banking house, and in November 1875 purchased the shares on behalf of the British government. ‘It is just settled,’ he wrote to the Queen in triumph; ‘you have it, Madam. The French government has been out-generaled.’
¹¹
Though it could hardly be considered as a gift from the Prime Minister to his sovereign, she was spellbound by this theatrical way and the myth that he had in effect presented his sovereign with this great waterway linking Britain to India, the Mother Country to its Empire, West to East. There could be no more striking proof of her country’s greatness.