To Austen’s wife – of whose possessive devotion he had long since grown tired – he wrote three months later, acknowledging her ‘repeated kind messages’, complaining that his health could not be worse and that, of all places, London was the one to which he was least suited.
My plans about leaving England are more unsettled than ever [he continued]. I anticipate no benefit from it, nor from anything else, but I am desirous [of leading] an even more reclusive life than I do at present…I grieve to say that my hair grows very badly, and I think more grey, which I can unfeignedly declare occasions me more anguish than even the prospect of death.13
Despite the gloomy remarks about London and his health which he made in his letter to Sara Austen, Disraeli was in town again three weeks later, ‘in excellent spirits,’ according to Meredith, who had invited him to dinner. He was ‘full of schemes for the projected journey to Stamboul and Jerusalem; full, as usual, also of capital stories, but he could make a story out of nothing’.
He came up Regent Street, when it was crowded [Meredith wrote in his diary], wearing his blue surtout, a pair of military light blue trousers, black stockings with red stripes, and shoes! ‘The people’, he said, ‘quite made way for me as I passed. It was like the opening of the Red Sea, which I now perfectly believe from experience. Even well dressed people stopped to look at me.’ I should think so!14
That same month Disraeli also had dinner with Edward Lytton Bulwer at his house in Hertford Street, together with four men who were, respectively, to become a Secretary of State, Ambassador at Constaninople, a Cabinet Minister and Lord Chief Justice; and, once again, Disraeli was remarkable for the colourful eccentricity of his dress and the wit and fluency of his conversation.
He wore green velvet trousers [his host remembered], a canary-coloured waistcoat, low shoes, silver buckles, lace at his wrists and his hair in ringlets…If on leaving the table and asked which was the cleverest of the party, we should have been obliged to say, ‘the man in the green velvet trousers’.*
Shortly after this dinner party at Bulwer’s, Disraeli was staying at the Union Hotel in Cockspur Street when he wrote to T. M. Evans, his former fellow clerk, to whom he owed money, and to whom he addressed a long and devious letter, apologizing for having been ‘too long silent’, explaining that it was because, for the last three years, life had not afforded him a moment’s ease, and now ‘after having lived in perfect solitude for nearly eighteen months’, he was about to be shipped off ‘for the last resource of a warmer climate’.
He protested that to leave England in such a state as his, without finally arranging his ‘distracted affairs’, cost him ‘a pang which [was] indeed bitter’. And he said that it would be a great consolation to him to know before his departure that ‘dear Evans’ was ‘prospering in the world’.
He went on to acknowledge Evans’s ‘generous and manly soul’; to say that the first step he would take when he had the power to do so would be in Evans’s favour; and that he hoped ‘some day or other, we may look back to these early adventures, rather as a matter of philosophical speculation than individual sorrow’. He hoped to see Evans, on his return from his travels, at Bradenham House but at present he was ‘only the inmate of an unsocial hotel’.15
On the day he wrote to Evans from the Union Hotel, Cockspur Street, he wrote also to Austen to say that he had passed ‘the last week, nearly in a trance from digitalis’. ‘I sleep’, he had told him, ‘literally sixteen out of the twenty-four hours and am quite dozy now.’ He could but hope that his forthcoming travels would ‘effect a cure’.16
‘We ate; we drank; we ate with our fingers, we drank in a manner I never recollect – the wine was not bad but had it been poison…it was such a compliment for a Moslemin that I must quaff it all…we quaffed it in rivers. The Bey called for the Brandy…we drank it all – the room turned round.’
‘THIS ROCK’, wrote Disraeli of Gibraltar, ‘is a wonderful place with a population infinitely diversified – Moors with costumes radiant as a rainbow or an eastern melodrama…Jews with gaberdines and skullcaps, Genoese, Highlanders [of the garrison] and Spaniards.’1
‘In the Garrison Library’, he told his father, ‘are all your books’, adding archly, ‘it also possesses a copy of another book, supposed to be written by a member of our family, and which is looked upon at Gibraltar as one of the masterpieces of the nineteenth century. You may feel their intellectual pulse from this. At first I apologised and talked of youthful blunders and all that, really being ashamed; but finding them, to my astonishment, sincere, and fearing they were stupid enough to adopt my last opinion, I shifted my position just in time, looked very grand, and passed myself off as a child of the sun, like the Spaniard in Peru.’2
He had arrived at Gibraltar with William Meredith in the middle of June 1830 and had soon been presented to General Sir George Don, the acting governor of the fortress in the absence of its official governor, the Duke of Kent.
Don was ‘a very fine old gentleman almost regal in his manner,’ so Disraeli wrote. ‘He possesses a large private fortune, all of which he here disburses, and has ornamented Gibraltar, as a lover does his mistress.’3
So often drawn to women older than himself, Disraeli was much taken with Lady Don, who was ‘without exception one of the most agreeable personages [he] had ever met, excessively acute and piquante…To listen to her you would think you were charming away the hour with a blooming beauty in Mayfair; and, though excessively infirm, her eye is so brilliant and so full of moquerie that you quite forget her wrinkles. All in all,’ he added with characteristic hyperbole, she was ‘the cleverest and most charming woman [he] had ever met’.4
As well as Government House, a former convent, where he introduced his visitors to his favourite drink, champagne and lemonade, Sir George enjoyed the use of ‘a delightful Pavillion…at the extreme point of the Rock’ as well as a villa at San Roque. He suggested that, having enjoyed his hospitality at these places, his guests should make an excursion into Spain, a venture which foreign tourists seldom undertook since the few posadas offered little apart from a roof for the night and plenty of bugs. But the scenery was ‘most beautiful’ and, although the terrain was infested with robbers and smugglers, these miscreants, so Disraeli was assured, ‘commit no personal violence but lay you on the ground and clean out your pockets. If you have less than sixteen dollars they shoot you. That is the tariff and is a loss worth risking.’ In the event, Disraeli and Meredith were not troubled by these bandits; but on their return to Griffith’s Hotel in Gibraltar they encountered two Englishmen who had been robbed of all their possessions in a village through which they also had passed a day or two earlier with their French guide and manservant, an excellent cook and ‘celeberated shot’ who, so Disraeli said, ‘could speak all languages except English of which he [made] a sad affair’.
He is fifty but light as a butterfly…He did everything, remedied every inconvenience, and found an expedient for every difficulty. Never did I live so well as among these wild mountains of Andalusia, so exquisite is his cookery…