CHAPTER VII

LADY BRADFORD AND LADY CHESTERFIELD

1873-1875

To Disraeli the rupture of a union so complete as was that between him and his wife meant more than it would have meant to most affectionate husbands. His temperament was such that he could not be happy, and could not bring out the best work of which he was capable, without intimate female association and sympathy. 'My nature demands that my life should be perpetual love,' had been a glowing outburst of his youth; and that love, for all his wealth of men friends and the affection which he lavished on them, must be the love of woman. In Henrietta Temple he wrote: A female friend, amiable, clever, and devoted, is a possession more valuable than parks and palaces; and, without such a muse, few men can succeed in life, none be content.' Throughout his whole life he had been blessed with devotion and sympathy of this kind in ample measure. Two women, first his sister and then his wife, had made him and his ambitions the centre of their existence; to both of them his own affection and devotion had been unstinted; there had been between him and them a constant communion of thoughts and hopes and sympathies. In a lesser degree Mrs. Brydges Willyams, in her later years, shared in this close intimacy. There were, moreover, other ladies whose sympathetic appreciation had cheered and helped his career such as Mrs. Austen, Lady Blessington, and Frances Anne Lady Londonderry. 'I feel fortunate,' he wrote in 1874, 'in serving a female Sovereign. I owe everything to woman; and if, in the sunset of life, I have 1 To Lady Bradford.

still a young heart, it is due to that influence.' With all the women who influenced his life he kept up a constant correspondence of a romantic and sentimental kind, in which he revealed, not merely his doings, but his thoughts and his character. 'A she-correspondent for my money,' was the exclamation of one of his exuberant youthful heroes; and it is to the fact that he carried on throughout his life a copious correspondence with women that our knowledge of the real Disraeli is largely due.

With Lady Beaconsfield's death the last of the women with whom he had hitherto enjoyed this sympathetic intercourse passed away; and he was left for the time widowed indeed. Few men at his age— sixty-eight would have had the freshness of heart to form new attachments, and to resume with others the sentimental and romantic intimacy which had proved so stimulating an influence; and of those who still possessed sufficient youthfulness for the adventure, most would have been prevented, especially if public men, by the fear of incurring censure and ridicule. But Disraeli's affections were still warm, and craved sympathetic understandings; nor was he to be deterred by possible ridicule from following their dictates. He spoke for himself when he wrote a few years earlier in Lothair 1: 'Threescore and ten, at the present day, is the period of romantic passions. As for our enamoured sexagenarians, they avenge the theories of our cold-hearted youth.'

Among those who showed him special kindness in his early months of loneliness and desolation were two sisters, whom he had long known in society, Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford. Anne Countess of Chesterfield was the eldest, and Selina Countess of Bradford was the youngest, of five sisters, daughters of the first Lord Forester, the head of an ancient Shropshire family. Of the other sisters one married Lord Carrington's eldest son, Robert John Smith, and died young in 1832, before her husband succeeded to the title. She was of course a neighbour of the

1 Ch. 35.

1873]

THE FIVE FORESTER SISTERS

6

239

Disraelis after they established themselves at Bradenham in 1829; and it was at Wycombe Abbey, but apparently after Mrs. Smith's death, that Disraeli first met Lady Bradford. Mr. D. will tell you,' wrote Lady Bradford to Mrs. Disraeli in March, 1868, that our first acquaintance was 100 years ago in poor Lord Carrington's house, before he [Disraeli] knew you.' Another sister married General Anson, who was Commander-in-Chief in India when the Mutiny broke out; 1 and the remaining sister married Lord Albert Conyngham, afterwards the first Lord Londesborough. In their youth the five sisters were prominent in the world of fashion, gaiety, and sport the world that revolved round Almack's, of which their mother Lady Forester was an eminent patroness; and at least Lady Chesterfield, Mrs. Anson, and Lady Bradford had been reigning beauties. Disraeli, in his days of dandyism, was naturally thrown in their company. In 1835 he went to a specially gorgeous fancy dress ball with a party which included the Chesterfields and the Ansons, and told his sister that Lady Chesterfield was a sultana.' In 1838 he met at Wycombe Abbey a whole family party of the Foresters rather noisy, but very gay'-'Lady Chesterfield, George and Mrs. Anson, the Albert Conynghams, Forester,' and made the greatest friends with all of them,' he told Mrs. Wyndham Lewis.3 The second brother, General' Cis' Forester, who sat for Wenlock in Parliament for nearly half a century and succeeded to the title in 1874, had been a friend of Disraeli's from early years.

2

Of the five sisters only Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford were still living. Lady Chesterfield, who was a couple of years older than Disraeli, was the widow of the sixth Earl of Chesterfield who had died seven years before. Her daughter had married one of the Reform Bill dissentients, Carnarvon. Lady Bradford was the wife of the third Earl of Bradford, a sporting peer, and a man of

1 See Vol. IV.,
p. 87.

2 See Vol. I., pp. 302, 303.

8 See Vol. II., p. 49.