She was wealthy, idiosyncratic and in search of love; he was younger and deep in debt – how the marriage of Benjamin and Mary Anne Disraeli broke every rule in the bookOn the night of 12 April 1867, Benjamin Disraeli experienced his greatest political triumph, the passing of the 1867 Reform Act. Jubilant Tory MPs swept him out of the Palace of Westminster towards the Carlton Club on St James’s Street, where a crowd of supporters was waiting to toast his success. But as his parliamentary colleagues embarked on the serious business of drinking themselves into a stupor, Disraeli slipped away to a quiet white house on the edge of Hyde Park and to his wife Mary Anne. He arrived home to find her waiting with a late supper for him, consisting of a Fortnum & Mason raised pie and champagne. “He ate half the pie and drank all the champagne,” Mary Anne reported. “Then he said, ‘Why, my dear, you are more like a mistress than a wife.’”Benjamin and Mary Anne are figures around whom anecdotes coalesce: about what they wore, what they did and what they said. “My wife is a very clever woman,” ran one of Disraeli’s much-quoted sayings. “But she can never remember who came first, the Greeks or the Romans.” Mary Anne apparently told Queen Victoria that she always slept with her arms around Disraeli’s neck, and scandalised prim hostesses at country house breakfasts by discussing the beauty of her Dizzy – as she called him – in his bath. Continue reading...
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