manservant with mustachios which, in Disraeli’s words, ‘touch the earth. Withal mild as a lamb, tho’ daggers always about his person.’ This was Giovanni Battista Falcieri, Byron’s former manservant.15
The presence of Clay [observed Robert Blake in his excellent account of Disraeli’s tour] removed whatever restraining influence Meredith may have had on Disraeli. He now behaved with a flamboyance, conceit and affectation which did him no good, though he seems to have been wholly unaware of this in his letters.16
‘Affectation tells here even better than wit,’ Disraeli wrote from Malta. ‘Yesterday at the racket court [as I was] sitting in the gallery among strangers, the ball entered, slightly struck me, and fell at my feet. I picked it up and, observing a young rifleman excessively stiff, I humbly requested him to forward its passage into the court, as I really had never thrown a ball in my life. This incident has been the general subject of conversation at all the messes today.’17
It is most doubtful that this kind of affectation created such ‘a good impression’ as Disraeli thought it did; or that his collection of pipes – his ‘Turkish pipe six feet long with an amber mouth piece’, his Meerschaum, and his ‘most splendid Dresden green china pipe’ – helped him to become the ‘greatest smoker in Malta’. Nor can his flamboyant clothes have elicited the admiration he liked to suppose, consisting, as one outfit did, of ‘the costume of a Greek pirate, a blood-red shirt with silver studs as big as shillings, an immense scarf or girdle full of pistols and daggers, a red cap, red slippers, blue broad-striped jacket and trousers…Excessively wicked.’18 This ensemble, so James Clay assured him, helped him to achieve a ‘complete and unrivalled triumph’, a description more suited to Disraeli’s own opinion of his success than to Clay’s. Indeed, Clay, who later became an authority on whist and Member of Parliament for Hull, gave Sir William Gregory, an Irish Member, the impression that Disraeli on Malta had been an object of derision and distaste rather than admiration.
‘It would not have been possible to have found a more agreeable, unaffected companion when they were by themselves,’ Gregory wrote. ‘But when they got into society, his coxcombry was intolerable…He made himself so hateful to the officers’ mess that, while they welcomed Clay, they ceased to invite “that damned bumptious Jew boy” who, when he had been invited, turned up in Andalusian dress.’19
William Meredith said that when Disraeli ‘paid a round of visits’, he would do so in his ‘white trousers, and a sash of all the colours in the rainbow. In this wonderful costume he paraded all round Valetta, followed by one-half of the population, and, as he himself said, putting a complete stop to all business. He, of course, included the Governor [Sir Frederick Ponsonby] and Lady Emily in his round to their no small astonishment.’
Yesterday I called on Ponsonby [Disraeli told his father]. I flatter myself that he passed through the most extraordinary quarter of an hour of his existence. I gave him no quarter and at last made our nonchalant Governor roll on the sofa, from his risible convulsions. Then I jumped up, remembered that I must be sadly breaking into his morning, and was off, making it a rule always to leave with a good impression. He pressed me not to go. I told him I had so much to do! I walked down the Strada Reale, which is nearly as good as Regent Street, and got five invitations to dinner (literally a fact). When I arrived home I found an invitation for Tuesday.20
At the beginning of October 1830, Clay and his friends sailed for Cyprus, a ‘most lovely island’, in a chartered yacht, the Susan, a name which, so Disraeli said, was a ‘bore, but, as we can’t alter it, we have painted it out’; and from there they sailed for Prevesa, now in Greece, at that time part of the Turkish empire.
They then travelled overland to Arta, where Disraeli was deeply moved by the muezzin call from the minaret. Here the Albanian governor provided the travellers with an escort to take them on to Yanina, where they were presented to the Grand Vizier before whom Disraeli ‘bowed with all the nonchalance of St James’s’.
The Grand Vizier was ‘a little, ferocious-looking, shrivelled, careworn man, placidly dressed with a brow covered with wrinkles, and with a countenance clouded with anxiety and thought’.
The English travellers, who had been shown into his divan ‘ahead of a crowd of patient supplicants in the ante-chamber’, were then taken to the Grand Vizier’s son, who was the very reverse of his father – ‘incapable of affairs, refined in his manners, plunged in debauchery and magnificent in dress. Covered with gold and diamonds, he bowed to us with the ease of a Duke of Devonshire and said the English were the most polished of nations.’
I can give you no idea in a letter of all the Pashas and all the Agas that I have visited [Disraeli told Benjamin Austen]; all the pipes I smoked, all the coffee I sipped, all the sweetmeats I devoured…For a week I was in a scene equal to anything in the Arabian Nights – such processions, such dresses, such cortèges of horsemen, such caravans of camels, then the delight of being made much of by a man who was daily decapitating half the Province. Every evening we paid visits, attended reviews, and crammed ourselves with sweetmeats; every evening dancers and singers were sent to our quarters by the Vizier or some Pasha.21
Meredith gave a description of his friend’s costume on such occasions: ‘Figure to yourself a shirt entirely red with silver studs…green pantaloons with a velvet stripe down the sides, and a silk Albanian shawl with a long fringe of divers colours round his waist, red Turkish slippers and, to complete all, his Spanish jacket covered with embroidery and ribbons. Was this costume English or fancy dress? asked a little Greek Physician. He was told “Inglese e fantastico”.’22
In an exceptionally long letter to his father, Disraeli gave an amusing description of a drunken evening during ‘this wondrous week in Albania’:
We ate; we drank; we ate with our fingers, we drank in a manner I never recollect – the wine was not bad but had it been poison the forbidden juice was such a compliment from a Moslemin that I must quaff it all…we quaffed it in rivers. The Bey called for the Brandy – unfortunately there was another bottle – we drank it all – the room turned round; the wild attendants who sat at our feet seemed dancing in strange and fantastic whirls; the Bey shook hands with me…he roared; I smacked him on the back. I remember no more. In the middle of the night I woke. I found myself sleeping on the divan, rolled up in its sacred carpet; the Bey had wisely reeled to the fire.23
‘We sailed from Prevesa through the remaining Ionian islands,’ Disraeli continued his account of his travels. ‘A cloudless sky, a summer atmosphere, and sunsets like the neck of a dove, completed all the enjoyment which I anticipated from roving in a Grecian sea. We were obliged, however, to keep a sharp lookout for Pirates, who are all about again – we exercised the crew every day with muskets, and their increasing prowess, and our own pistol exercise, kept up our courage.’24
I am quite a Turk [he wrote to Benjamin Austen], wear a turban, smoke a pipe six feet long and squat on a divan…I find the habits of this calm and luxurious people entirely agree with my own preconceived opinions of propriety, and I detest the Greeks more than ever. I do not find mere travelling on the whole very expensive, but I am ruined by my wardrobe…When I was presented to the Grand Vizier I made up such a costume from my heterogeneous wardrobe that the Turks who are mad on the subject of dress were utterly astounded.
In Athens, Disraeli and his companions were, so he claimed, the first Englishmen to visit the Acropolis, which had been shut up for nine years. ‘Athens is still in the power of the Turks,’ he wrote, ‘but the ancient remains have been respected. The Parthenon and the other temples which are in the Acropolis,