Lord George Bentinck

A Political History

Benjamin Disraeli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781560009474
• eBook ISBN: 9781351309585
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Lord George Bentinck is an account of Disraeli's relation with his parliamentary colleague and friend. It is not simply an account of the battle over the Corn Laws with Sir Robert Peel, but a most remarkable book, extremely readable, and full of often quoted and apt comments and descriptions. As a vivid story of one of the great parliamentary dramas in British history it is unsurpassed. The portraits of both Bentinck and Peel are both sympathetic and just. The book provides insight into mid-nineteenth century parliamentary life that remains unsurpassed.

It is hard to overstate the bitterness and fury which Peel's decision to repeal the Corn Laws had provoked in British politics. One biographer of Disraeli, Robert Blake, spoke of "Home Rule in 1886 and Munich in 1938 as the nearest parallels". Friendships were sundered, families divided, and the feuds of politics carried into private life to a degree quite unusual in British history. Those who are interested in the details of parliamentary warfare which raged until Peel's fall from power should consult Lord George Bentinck.

But the worth of this book goes beyond constitutional history or even the Irish food famine. Disraeli helps explain the intellectual and ideological grounds of the Young England Movement: a conservative force that aimed at a union of discontented industrial workers with aristocratic landowners and against factious Whigs, selfish factory owners and dissenting shopkeepers. In forging such a policy of principle, the Conservatives, as Disraeli's book well demonstrates, became a minority party but one which carried the full weight of moral politics.

Introduction to the Transaction Edition

Lord George Bentinck is an account of high political drama— among the best ever written. Lord George Bentinck, Benjamin Disraeli, and Sir Robert Peel are the stars, with Peel as the antagonist and Bentinck the subject and Disraeli the author as the protagonist team. “Although of perfectly different natures, they pulled together without any difficulty,” a contemporary observed.¹ By temperament, skills, background, and resources, they were ideally matched and necessary to one another. Disraeli wrote this biography as a tribute to his colleague, whose untimely death in 1848 left Disraeli alone to lead the Conservative party in the House of Commons.

Lord George Bentinck was well known in his day, even if most history books pass him by. From the 1820s to the mid- 1840s he was a dominant figure in English horse racing, acknowledged by many as “king of the turf.” In 1845 alone, his horses won 82 races. Victories came about in part thanks to Bentinck’s close attention to every detail of the diet, care, and training of his horses. As demonstrated in the events of this book, he had a phenomenal capacity for facts and their relations, and he was willing to put in as much effort as necessary to master them. He was a winner because he worked.

He was also known for his relentless integrity. Once, in a storyline worthy of Dick Francis, he became convinced that one of his own jockeys had thrown a race, and he pursued the matter, and the hapless jockey, regardless of cost until the Jockey Club was convinced and disqualified the rider. At a time when racing was a passion of the ruling class, Lord George Bentinck was one of the patricians.

Aside from his renown on the turf, family and fortune were enough to secure his standing in society’s highest elite. Bentinck’s father was the Duke of Portland, and both his grandfather and his uncle had been prime ministers. Bentinck himself was immensely rich. His contemporaries report that more than once he stood to gain or lose £150,000 on a race (he was proud to back his judgment), and in the fashion-conscious age of Beau Brummell, he never wore the same cravat twice. In short, “a vehement and imperious spirit, unflinching courage, a mind of great native vigor directed by a will that never knew submission, and the reputation for unbending rectitude that wins the confidence of men.”²

Lord George was also a long-standing member of the House of Commons. Though a member of Parliament for 18 years prior to the start of the events in this book, he spoke only infrequently in debates. During his first eight years he said nothing at all. Viewing himself as nothing but a good judge of men and horses, he admitted that he had little attraction to politics, and was known to put in appearances at Westminster in a topcoat pulled over hunting regalia.

Disraeli’s biography brings to life matters bigger than Bentinck’s personality: enduring issues and principles by which to govern and to live. We really meet Bentinck only in flashes. Yet since his pride did not demand sycophancy, he would have applauded Disraeli’s treatment. It took extreme provocation—”being sold” was Bentinck’s term—at the hands of his party’s leader, Sir Robert Peel, to move him off the back bench and track, into the forefront of national controversy and leadership. In 1845 he had clout, ability, indignation, and a determination to do something about it. What he and like-minded men needed was (and is) rare: an imagination powerful enough in depth and breadth to bring the full range of their convictions into focus and devise an effective program of action.

No word attaches more naturally to Benjamin Disraeli than imagination, though others may apply equally. The chronicle of his life and achievements is erratic, even wild. Yet a unifying purpose may be found underlying his major successes and failures, especially as a statesman.³ From his flamboyant, fervid youth to the full maturity of power, Disraeli strove to discern, articulate, and participate in the essence of English greatness. “My politics are described by one word,” he said, “and that word is England.” His apprehension of order is his greatest accomplishment and his enduring legacy.

But Disraeli was not a seer only. “I am only truly great in action,” he once said of himself. Elsewhere he wrote, “Action may not always be happiness, but there is no happiness without action.” Disraeli’s compulsion to act boldly to defend and enhance English order was irresistible, perhaps as often as not precipitous. The tension between Disraeli’s great gifts and the demands of the situations in which he placed himself may be the best key to understanding his failures. For those who govern, the present moment is always decisive, but imagination is seldom rushed to good effect.

The meaning and truth of this emerge in a contrast with Disraeli’s and Bentinck’s great antagonist in these events, Sir Robert Peel. “Though nearly two generations have elapsed since his death,” wrote Moneypenny in 1912, “…he still suffers from the excessive praise, and in a less degree from the excessive blame, that fall to statesmen while they live.” Moneypenny continues,

Mainly interested in finance and in practical measures of administration, he cared little for the imperial ideas of generations that had preceded and were to follow his own. But, as Mr. Gladstone once remarked, he was the best man of business who was ever Prime Minister; and he was that not only by virtue of what Disraeli called his “unrivaled powers of dispatching affairs,” but also by his possession of many of the higher moral qualities of the ideal man of business. There was indeed a good deal more of egoism and ambition in his character than has often been recognized, but he was incapable of any petty or ignoble self-seeking; and in point of industry, rectitude, and devotion to public duty, he set an example which has served permanently to raise the standard of English government. That is a better title to fame than the dubious distinction, which Disraeli assigned him, of having been the greatest Member of Parliament that ever lived.⁴

Walter Bagehot, in his lucid 1856 essay “The Character of Sir Robert Peel,” cuts to the heart of Peel’s strengths and weaknesses:

A great administrator is not a man likely to desire to have fixed opinions,—his natural bent and tendency is to immediate action: the existing and pressing circumstances of the case fill up his mind; the letters to be answered, the documents to be filed, the memoranda to be made, engross his attention; he is angry if you distract him. A bold person who suggests a matter of principle, or a difficulty of thought, or an abstract result that seems improbable in the case “before the board,” will be set down as a speculator, a theorist, a troubler of practical life. To expect to hear from such men profound views of future policy, digested plans of distant action, is to mistake their genius entirely…. So the brain of the great administrator is naturally occupied with the details of the day, the passing dust, the granules of that day’s life; and his unforeseeing temperament turns away uninterested from reaching speculations, from vague thought, and from extensive and far-off plans. Of course it is not meant that a great administrator has absolutely no general views: some indeed he must have,—a man cannot conduct the detail of affairs without having some plan which regulates that detail; he cannot help having some idea, vague or accurate, indistinct or distinct, of the direction in which he is going and the purpose for which he is traveling. But the difference is, that this plan is seldom his own, the offspring of his own brain, the result of his own mental contention; it is the plan of someone else.⁵

For one who assumes the burden of governing, “The necessary effect of all this labor is, that those subject to it have no opinions,” according to Bagehot. “It requires a great deal of time to have opinions; belief is a slow process.”⁶ Unlike Peel, Disraeli insisted both on governing, and on having opinions that were his own. This was his quandary. Quick and insightful, Disraeli’s mind was amazingly gifted, but it is still small wonder that the insistent “now” of the political moment caught him on many occasions less than wholly prepared.

The “now” of Lord George Bentinck, however, found Disraeli at his best; in a sense he had spent years preparing for it. “Disraeli’s personal contest with Peel is the dramatic moment of his career,” observes Paul Elmer More.⁷ F. J. Heamshaw writes, “It was he personally who brought Peel down, as clearly as it was David who brought down Goliath.

And the one event was scarcely less spectacular and sensational than the other.”⁸

Disraeli was an exceptional practitioner of the art of politics, an art that in his day found its highest expression in Parliamentary debate. His early forays were failures. He lost his first four elections. Once he did win a seat, his maiden speech was a disaster: the derisive laughter of the House eventually drowned out his words. According to Lord Blake, the effort was so unfortunate that, “If Disraeli’s peroration had been listened to in silence it might have blasted his Parliamentary reputation forever. As it was, he inspired a certain sympathy for his courage if for nothing else when, having been on his feet for precisely the time that he intended, he shouted in a voice heard high above the hubbub, ‘I will sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me.’”⁹ His talent matured into ability. Weekly Chronicle, a Newsweek of the nineteenth century, describes Disraeli in top form at the time of these events: “No report can give an idea of the effect produced in the House of Commons. The manner of delivery, the perfect intonation of the voice, the peculiar looks of the speaker—all contributed to a success that we believe to be perfectly unparalleled. No man within our recollection has wielded a similar power over the sympathies and passions of his hearers.”¹⁰

He was heard indeed. Again according to Weekly Chronicle:

For him to rise late, in a stormy debate, cool, even to iciness, amidst the fever-heat of party atmosphere around, was suddenly to arrest all passions, all excitement, all murmurs of conversation, and convert them into one absorbing feeling of curiosity and expectation. They knew not on whom to fix their watch—whether on the speaker, that they might not lose the slightest gesture of his by-play, or whether they should concentrate their attention on his distinguished victim, whom he had taught them almost to regard with levity. The power of the orator was more confessed, perhaps, in the nervous twitchings of Sir Robert Peel, and his utter powerlessness to look indifferent, or to conceal his palpable annoyance, than even in the delirious laughter with which the House accepted and sealed the truth of the attacks.¹¹

Despite his dominant presence in the actual events, Disraeli is almost invisible in Lord George Bentinck. To understand this, remember that his esteem for Bentinck, his friend and colleague, was great and genuine. “Overwhelmed by a great calamity [in] the death of one to whom I was bound by personal ties, far stronger even than those political ties that knit us together,” is how Disraeli described himself in a letter of 1848. “It is the greatest sorrow I have ever experienced,” he wrote in another.¹² Disraeli also recognized the significance of Bentinck’s complementary style and standing. As noted earlier, Bentinck had an encyclopedic mind for facts, and his own speeches were always closely and even tediously tied to the best available evidence. Because of his established credibility and minute attention to detail, Bentinck’s words carried weight and provided a powerful foundation for Disraeli’s attacks. In tribute to his friend and to his importance in these events, Disraeli stays in the wings offstage.¹³

Also revealing may be a comparison between Disraeli’s treatment of Bentinck and his development of leading characters in the body of his other narrative prose, his novels. Disraeli wrote fiction of enduring interest. Several of his books remain in print, and for good reason. There is a gemlike quality about them: the best, including Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred, sparkle brilliantly, though they can be rough and are not all equally well polished. In praise of Disraeli’s literary talent, one critic of the time went so far as to ask, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Introduction
• I. State of Parties in the House of Commons at the Close of 1845
• II. Four Meetings of the Cabinet in One Week
• III. 1846—Opening of Parliament
• IV. Proposition to Repeal the Corn Laws
• V. Formation of the Protectionist Party
• VI. Second Reading of the Bill to Repeal the Corn Laws
• VII. State of Ireland
• VIII. The Coercion Bill
• IX. Remedial Measures for Ireland
• X. Easter
• XI. Critical Position of the Government
• XII. Third Reading of the Corn Bill
• XIII. Reciprocity
• XIV. The Protectionist Party Resolve to Oppose the Coercion Bill
• XV. The Canning Episode
• XVI. Overthrow of the Peel Cabinet
• XVII. Character of Sir Robert Peel
• XVIII. The Sugar Bill—Progress Andreaction
• XIX. Irish Railways
• XX. 1847—The Irish Famine
• XXI. The Bank Charter Act
• XXII. Dissolution of Parliament
• XXIII. The Panic
• XXIV. The Jewish Question
• XXV. 1848—Relinquishment of Theleadership of the Protectionist Party by Lord George Bentinck
• XXVI. The Sugar and Coffee Planting Committee
• XXVII. Foreign Politics—Close of the Session 1848
• XXVIII. The Last Chapter