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, have necessarily suffered during the siege, but the injury is only in the detail; the general effect is not marred…The temple of Theseus looks, at a short distance, as if it were just finished by Pericles.’ ‘Of all that I have visited,’ he added, ‘nothing has more completely realized all that I imagined and all that I could have wished than Athens.’25
All the houses in the city were, however, roofless and there were ‘hundreds of shells and cannon balls lying among the ruins’; while the surrounding country was desolate.
Happy are we to get a shed for nightly shelter [Disraeli told his father, having made an excursion to Marathon] and never have been fortunate enough to find one not swarming with vermin. My sufferings in this way are great. And the want of sleep from these vermin, and literally I did not sleep a wink the whole time I was out, is very bad, as it unfits you for daily exertion…We found a wild boar just killed at a little village and purchased half of it – but it is not as good as Bradenham pork.26
He was thankful when the wind changed and the Susan was able to set sail for Constantinople, of which he caught sight just as the sun was setting on 10 December 1830. ‘It baffled all description,’ he wrote of that first sight of it: ‘an immense mass of buildings, cupolas, cypress groves and minarets’. He felt an excitement which, so he said, he thought was dead.27
In Constantinople they found the British Ambassador, Sir Robert Gordon, welcoming, hospitable and – Disraeli was pleased to discover – as hostile to the Greeks as he was himself. A cousin of Byron and a future ambassador extraordinary in Vienna, Gordon was clearly delighted to have Disraeli and his friends as his guests and was much put out when they left after a visit lasting six weeks, pressing them to stay longer, offering them rooms in the embassy and, so Disraeli said, most reluctantly taking leave of them ‘in a pet’.
He made the most of them, however, while they were there:
Tell
