Disraeli, Benjamin

Disraeli, Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield (1804-1881), British writer, statesman, and Prime Minister (1868 and 1874-1880), who for more than three decades exerted a profound influence on British politics and Victorian Britain, and left an enduring stamp on the Conservative Party.

Disraeli was born on December 21, 1804, in London and educated at private schools in Blackheath and Walthamstow. Between the ages of 17 and 20 he was a law apprentice in a London office. During the same period he speculated in stocks and suffered heavy financial losses. Primarily in order to pay off his debts, he began writing novels, the first of which, Vivian Grey, appeared in 1826 with some success. Continuing to write novels in a fanciful, romantic vein, he frequented fashionable salons and dressed in an eccentric manner. In 1830 he travelled in Spain, the Balkans, Turkey, and the Levant. Upon his return he decided to enter politics; from 1832 to 1835 he ran unsuccessfully for Parliament, first as a Radical and then three times as a Tory.

Despite these defeats, he became well known through a series of pamphlets, tracts, and letters to The Times, in which he set forth the foundation of his Conservative philosophy. In the elections of 1837, after Queen Victoria ascended the throne, he finally won a seat in the House of Commons. With his maiden speech, however, he nearly ruined his career because his extravagant phraseology and dandified dress provoked derisive laughter from his fellow members. He slowly acquired a reputation in Parliament, but in 1841 he was refused a Cabinet post in the Conservative ministry of Sir Robert Peel. Disraeli laboured to win support for his policies, and to that end championed factory workers against the rich Whig manufacturers. His novels Coningsby, or the Younger Generation (1844) and Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845) expressed his views and increased his prestige in Parliament, especially with the so-called Young England group, which opposed Peel's conservatism. When Peel was engaged in his successful effort to repeal the Corn Laws in 1846, Disraeli's eloquent attacks on his party's chief won him leadership of the protectionists, but the divided Conservative Party failed to win the national election the following year.

Disraeli supported the Liberal Party prime minister Lord John Russell in 1847, when his government lifted the ban excluding adherents of the Jewish faith from Parliament. In 1852 Disraeli became Chancellor of the Exchequer under Edward Geoffrey Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, and he held the same office in the Derby ministries of 1858-1859 and 1866-1868.

In 1859, as Conservative leader in the House of Commons, Disraeli introduced a reform bill extending the franchise to all taxpayers. The bill failed to carry, but later Disraeli succeeded in the passage of the much more democratic Reform Act of 1867. When Derby retired the following year, Disraeli became prime minister, but his government was defeated in December of 1868, and he spent six years in parliamentary opposition to the liberal prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. After the elections of 1874 Disraeli was able to form a strong majority government, backed by the partisan sympathy of Queen Victoria, whose close friend he became. ("Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel," he said.)

His prime ministership was marked by many notable events. He promoted legislation in 1874 against Roman Catholic tendencies in Church of England ritual. In 1875, to protect the "lifeline" of the empire, he took personal responsibility for borrowing £4 million to purchase for the government the shares in the Suez Canal that were owned by the Khedive of Egypt. Disraeli further emphasized his imperial policy by creating for Queen Victoria in 1876 the title of Empress of India. In that year Queen Victoria created him Earl of Beaconsfield in recognition of his services.

Disraeli's most spectacular triumph in external affairs came in 1878 as British plenipotentiary to the Congress of Berlin, which redrew the boundaries of south-eastern Europe after the defeat of Turkey in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. During the war, Disraeli had been concerned with preventing Russia from gaining strategic advantages in the Mediterranean Sea and had sent the British fleet to the Dardanelles in February 1878. At the Congress of Berlin, by brilliant diplomatic manoeuvres, he deprived Russia of many of the advantages of victory, and returned to England claiming to have won "peace with honour". The Queen offered to reward him with a dukedom, which he refused. Disraeli died in London on April 19, 1881. (When Victoria offered to come and see him on his deathbed, he is said to have answered, "No, it is better not. She would only ask me to take a message to Albert.") Disraeli's writings include Vindication of the British Constitution (1835) and the novels The Young Duke (1831), Henrietta Temple (1837), Tancred, or the New Crusade (1847), and Endymion (1880).

Despite his long public life, Disraeli is still regarded as an enigma. His multitude of enemies regarded him as an opportunist and a seeker of power; his legions of followers (some of whom founded the Primrose League in his memory) saw him as a man of high principle. These opposing views probably resulted from the contradictions inherent in his public acts. He was at once a Conservative and a Radical, and perhaps embodied the best of both traditions.