Chapter 8: Moving on, Moving up, 1849-59

Item 87a
The Munificent Mrs Brydges Willyams: - I
MS. Eng. lett. d. 341, fols. 86-7

Among the Bodleian Library's collections relating to Disraeli are three volumes of typewritten copies of the correspondence of Disraeli and his wife with Mrs Brydges Willyams (d. 1863) which were previously in E.L. de Rothschild's library. The editors of the Disraeli project calculate that Mrs Brydges Willyams ranks third (after Lord Derby and his son Stanley) as the recipient of the largest number of letters from Disraeli in the 1850s.

Mrs Sarah Brydges Willyams was a wealthy octogenarian widow who claimed to be distantly connected to Disraeli. She befriended him in 1851, made him her executor and legatee (he eventually inherited about £30,000) and left instructions about her burial at Hughenden. The Disraelis visited her annually at Torquay. In the second half of the 1850s Disraeli wrote over 30 letters a year to her. Like the Liberal Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, Earl of Oxford and Asquith (1852-1928), many of his most descriptive letters were written to women, though the parallel is not exact.

This letter written from Downing Street on 16 June 1858 gives a lively account of Disraeli's heavy workload, Derby's health and the likely strains upon it, and Lord Stanley's indispensability. His ironic comparison between his political enemies and the Sepoys in the recent early Indian independence battles between guerilla forces led by Tatya Tope and the British under Sir Colin (later Baron) Campbell (1792-1863) jars with today's sensibilities, though the tone conceals the seriousness with which he viewed his responsibilities.