Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 15.djvu/109

 an interesting record has been preserved by perhaps the only suryiving eye-witness of a memorable scene which occurred in the court of queen's bench on 22 Nov. 1838. Disraeli had published a libel on Mr. Charles Austin, the celebrated parliamentary counsel, who instructed his solicitor to file a criminal information against him. Disraeli did not appear, either personally or by counsel, and in due time was called up to receive judgment. The gentleman who was then under articles to Mr. Austin's solicitors was in court that morning, and as soon as he entered he saw Disraeli sitting in the solicitors' 'well,' dressed in the height of the fashion. When Sir John Campbell rose to pray the judgment of the court, Disraeli begged permission to say a few words, and then spoke for about ten minutes with an eloquence, propriety, and dignity which the young clerk never forgot, and long loved to describe. His apology was accepted as both ample and honourable, and the future prime minister of England was dismissed with a fine of one shilling.

The year 1839 was an eventful one in Disraeli's life. In July he made his famous speech on the chartist petition, alluded to with justifiable pride in 'Sybil,' in which he declared 'that the rights of labour were as sacred as the rights of property.' In the same month he published the 'Tragedy of Count Alarcos,' which was no success; and in the following August he married Mrs. Wyndham Lewis, the widow of his former colleague, whose acquaintance he had made six years before at Leeds, when he described her as 'pretty and a flirt.'  With her fortune he was enabled to purchase the estate of Hughenden from the executors of the Young family and to assume the style and position of an English country gentleman. In Mrs. Lewis, moreover, he found not only the wealth which he required, but the sympathy, the courage, and the devotion of which he stood little less in need—'the perfect wife,' ever ready to console him under every disappointment, to enliven him in his darkest hours, and to rekindle his hopes when they seemed almost reduced to ashes. In illustration of her courage it may be mentioned that once when she was driving down with her husband to the House of Commons, her hand was crushed in the door of the carriage, and she suppressed every indication of the pain that she was suffering till she had seen him safe into Westminster Hall, for fear of distracting his mind from the very important speech which he was about to deliver. Those who were admitted to the intimacy of Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli used to say that he was fond of telling her in joke that he had married her for her money, to which she would invariably reply, 'Ah! but if you had to do it again, you would do it for love,' a statement to which he always smilingly assented. Only a few years before he had assured his sister Sarah that he would never marry for love, for that all the men who did so either beat their wives or ran away from them.

In 1841 Disraeli was returned for Shrewsbury, one of the 'great conservative party' which Sir Robert Peel had led to victory. The accepted version of the controversy between Disraali and Sir Robert Peel is derived, for the most part, from the friends of Sir Robert and the enemies of Disraeli. It is likewise to be remembered that the public opinion of England has declared in favour of free trade, a result which was by no means certain forty-three years ago; and that the material aspects of the question have been allowed, as was inevitable, to colour very deeply the moral ones. 'The present generation,' says the editor of Lord Beaconsfield's speeches, 'seems inclined to admit that the provocation given by Sir Robert Peel, especially by the style in which he lectured his former supporters for adhering to the principles in which he himself had so long and so sedulously trained them, was, if not sufficient to justify every one of these attacks, far greater than the victorious converts were either willing to acknowledge, or perhaps even able to appreciate. Their success, their talents, and the popularity of the cause they had expounded, dazzled the public eye, and neutralised for a time all the efforts of a beaten party to vindicate the justice of its anger. But we may learn from Mr. Morley's "Life of Mr. Cobden" that the old free-traders, at all events, were doubtful of the political morality which sanctioned the carriage of free trade in a parliament dedicated to protection, and that they saw little to condemn and something to applaud in Mr. Disraeli's satire.'

It was not, however, till 1843 that Disraeli saw anything to find fault with in the commercial policy of Sir Robert Peel, which, as he declared, was only a continuation of the system begun by Bolingbroke and carried on by Pitt, Liverpool, and Canning. And he himself, in a speech which he delivered at Shrewsbury on 9 May 1843, stated emphatically that his support of the corn laws was based not on economical but on social and political grounds. Our territorial constitution was the foundation of our greatness, and as far as protection to agriculture was necessary to that constitution he was a protectionist.