Author Description

James Anthony Froude was Regus Professor of Modern History at Oxford at the end of the 19th Century. He wrote this biography with the help of Ralph Disraeli, the Prime Minister's brother. Froude himself remarked 'it has pleased Gladstone, the very last person I thought of pleasing.' It can easily be forgotten that the Conservative Party has had apparently mortal leadership struggles in past centuries, none more so than when Benjamin Disraeli attacked Peel for the fundamental dishonesty of his position on free trade. It is well known that he described the Conservative Party as an 'organized hypocrisy'. A full account of that episode in Parliament is in this biography. It is the story of a man who in Victorian England was responsible for the creation of a 'Reconstructed Tory Party' but from this story it is plain that Disraeli only achieved a small part of his vision for England whose institutions he believed guaranteed the true freedom of her people.