Disraeli: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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: