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‌Enter Byron

BYRON’S relationship with Holland House had got off to a bad start. In 1807 his first published volume of poems, Hours of Idleness, had been unfavourably reviewed by Brougham in the Edinburgh Review. Byron’s riposte, English Bards and Scots Reviewers, published the following year, was a swingeing satire on his poetic contemporaries, on the Edinburgh reviewers (‘Holland’s hirelings’), and on the Hollands themselves, whom he believed, mistakenly, to have inspired the hostile criticism. His lines on the Hollands, with their dig at Lady Holland’s virtue, were especially offensive:

Blest be the banquets spread at Holland House,

Where Scotsmen feed, and critics may carouse…

They write for food – and feed because they write:

And lest, when heated with the grape,

Some glowing thoughts should to the press escape,

And tinge with red the female reader’s cheek,

My lady skims the cream of each critique,

Breathes o’er the page her purity of soul,

Reforms each error, and refines the whole.

It was typical of the Hollands’ good nature – or carelessness of criticism – that they did not hold Byron’s lines too much against him, and when, four years later, using his fellow poet Samuel Rogers as a go-between, Byron asked Holland’s help in preparing his maiden speech in the House of Lords, he willingly agreed. The speech, delivered on 27 February 1812, was a protest against a frame-breaking bill, directed at Luddite weavers in Nottinghamshire (Byron’s home county), making the smashing of machinery punishable by death. Holland, who had recently been appointed Recorder of Nottingham, was naturally against such a barbaric measure, and though Byron’s speech failed to sway the House of Lords, it was warmly greeted by the opposition peers. (The bill, in fact, was never put into effect.)

In retrospect Holland doubted that Byron would ever have made a good politician: ‘His fastidious and artificial taste and his over-irritable temper would, I think, have prevented him ‌from ever excelling in Parliament.’¹ But he was happy to welcome a new recruit to the opposition, and invited him to dine at Holland House that evening. It was a gathering of the Foxite inner circle: the dukes of Devonshire and Bedford, the Marquess of Lansdowne (the second son of the first marquess, his elder brother having died the year before), lords Grey, Lauderdale and Cowper. In this intimate setting, with its easy flow of conversation, Byron could be himself in a way he could never be in public. Relaxed and delightful, the evening confirmed his arrival on the political scene; the publication of his lines on Princess Charlotte shortly after set the seal on his Whig credentials.

By now Byron had realized his mistake in attributing the hostile notice in the Edinburgh Review to the Hollands and, largely to please them, had suppressed the next edition of English Bards and Scots Reviewers. He was pinning all his hopes on his forthcoming poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the product of his four years of wandering in Greece and the Near East. He sent an advance copy to Lord Holland, deliberately making light of it in his accompanying note: ‘Your lordship, I am sorry to observe today, is troubled with the gout; if my book can produce a laugh against itself or the author, it will be of some service. If it can set you to sleep the ‌benefit will be yet greater.’²

Byron’s pretended insouciance, as we know, was unnecessary. The publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage on 10 March 1812 made him famous overnight. Feted in society, a star in the salons of the Whig aristocracy, he preserved a particular fondness for Holland House, and regarded Holland as his political guide and mentor. At Holland House too, there was a literary mix he found particularly attractive, poets and writers mingling naturally with diplomats, politicians and grandees.

Holland’s literary tastes had been very much set by Fox. Like his uncle he loved the classics, and in English poetry, Chaucer and Shakespeare apart, he preferred the poets of the eighteenth century; he loved Cowper, Swift and Pope, and was never without a book of Dryden’s poems by his bedside. He had a few contemporary favourites: Walter Scott, though not his Tory politics; George Crabbe, whose low-keyed poems of country life had been much appreciated by Fox as well; Tom Moore, famed for his romantic Irish Melodies and his daring verse satires against the government; and the banker poet Samuel Rogers, best known for his long and now largely forgotten poem The Pleasures of Memory. Scott, living in Scotland, and Crabbe, a country rector, seldom came to London, but both Moore and Rogers were frequent visitors to Holland House. Moore, a Dublin grocer’s son, had won his way into the strongholds of Whig society as much by his sparkling conversation as by his talents. ‘I have known a dull man live on a bon mot ‌of Moore’s for a week,’³ wrote Byron. Rogers, by contrast, was dour and cadaverous, with a bitingly sarcastic tongue. (His voice was so weak, he explained, that people only listened when he said unkind things.) But he could be generous to friends in trouble, and his literary breakfasts at his house in St James’s Street, with its red-silk hangings and fine Renaissance paintings, were famous: Holland, Sheridan, Moore and Byron, as well as Coleridge and Wordsworth, were among the stars that gathered there.

Interestingly, the Hollands, like their friends on the Edinburgh Review, had a blind spot where the Lake Poets were concerned. ‘This will never do,’ was Jeffrey’s comment when Lyrical Ballads first appeared, while Fox, when presented with a copy by Wordsworth, had politely remarked that he was not of the poet’s faction. The Hollands themselves had met Wordsworth on a journey to the north in 1807, Lady Holland finding his conversation ‘much superior to his writings’. Essentially Augustan in their tastes, they could not agree with his celebration of the rural poor, unlettered cottagers and labourers to whom he ascribed philosophic sentiments more suited, surely, to the educated classes. As for Coleridge, he was so much talked about that Lady Holland was curious to meet him, though she had heard that his conversation was ‘often obscure, a mystical species of Platonic philosophy, which he dresses up according to his own metaphysical ‌taste and calls the mind’,⁴ and she had no time for his poetry.

Byron would have joined with the Hollands in disliking the ‘pond poets’, as he called them, though he owed far more to Wordsworth than he cared to admit. But he delighted in the literary company at Holland House. Rogers and Moore were friends already, but Sheridan was a new acquaintance. Battered by life – he had recently lost his seat in Parliament – and frequently drunk, Sheridan still retained much of his charm: even his dregs, as Byron remarked, were better ‌than ‘the first sprightly runnings’⁵ of others. The Hollands were always remarkably kind to Sheridan, who had been financially ruined in 1809, when the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, his only capital asset, had been burnt to the ground. He frequently stayed the night at Holland House, when he would always take a bottle and a book to bed with him, ‘the former alone,’ remarked ‌Lady Holland, ‘intended for use.’⁶ On his way back to London the next day, he would stop for a dram at the Adam and Eve public house at the foot of the park, running up long bills which Holland had to pay.

Byron hugely admired Sheridan, and the two men, one at the outset of his fame, the other already a figure of the past, met frequently at Holland House, where Sheridan, undeterred by poverty and failure, still took on all comers. ‘He was superb!’ wrote Byron later.

…he had a sort of liking for me – and never attacked me – at least to my face, and he did everybody else – high names & wits and orators, some of them poets also – I have seen [him] cut up Whitbread – quiz Me de Staël – annihilate Colman – and do little less by some others (whose names as friends I set not down) ‌of good fame and abilities.⁷

Lady Holland was in her element amid such conversational fireworks, orchestrating and animating and adding the occasional caustic comment. ‘I am sorry to hear you are going to publish a poem,’ she remarked to one unfortunate ‌writer. ‘Can’t you suppress it?’⁸ To Rogers, who was writing a book on his travels, she said: ‘Your poetry is bad enough, so pray ‌be sparing of your prose.’⁹ Her husband, however, took most of the sting from her attacks, bathing all in the sunshine of his genial nature. Witty, well informed and questioning, he guided the conversation with the lightest of touches, and was especially kind to timid younger guests. Like his uncle, he was sympathetic to the ‘young ones’.

Byron, titled and a poet, spanned the two main elements at Holland House – the aristocratic Whigs and the writers and intellectuals who gravitated there. The two mixed happily at table but were well aware of their separate status. ‘Talents in literature,’ wrote Tom Moore ruefully, ‘…may lead to association with ‌the great but not equality.’¹⁰ Caroline Fox was a case in point; as a young woman at Bowood she had been loved by the great political philosopher Jeremy Bentham. He had never dared to tell his love, and when, years later, shortly before his death in 1832, he wrote her a playful letter mentioning his early feelings, she responded so frostily that he was deeply hurt. Bentham might be the leading thinker of the age, but Caroline had too great a sense of caste to consider someone who was only an attorney’s son.

Lady Holland took the idea of class more lightly. She never had any doubts as to which category she belonged, but she was much too intellectually and socially adventurous to be constrained by it. Perhaps the fact that she was not fully accepted in society had a bearing on her attitude, but her very recklessness in marrying against convention proved how little she was bound by it. And the Foxes, from the first Lord Holland’s runaway marriage onwards, had never paid much heed to conventional morality. Wit, talent and learning, far more than social status, were the keys to entry into Holland House, though the presence of the Whig nobility, their power backed by great possessions, gave it an authority it would otherwise have lacked.

Byron, of course, was delighted to be part of the company; after an impoverished and difficult youth it was a thrill to be accepted by his social and intellectual peers. Less happily, it was at Holland House that he first met Lady Caroline Lamb. He had seen her before at a party, when she, disgusted by the attention he was receiving, ostentatiously turned away when he was introduced. Now, arriving with his host at Holland House one afternoon, he found her, still muddied from her ride from Melbourne House in Piccadilly, sitting talking to Rogers and Moore. She jumped up on seeing him, and insisted on going to change before they were introduced. By the time the evening ended she had invited him to call on her next day.

From then on their romance took fire, Caroline dazzled by Byron’s fame and air of moodily romantic mystery, Byron fascinated by her boyish looks, her Devonshire House drawl, her wildness and originality. There was nothing discreet about their affair and Caroline’s exhibitionism and courting of scandal were a sore trial to all her family: the patient William, her mother Lady Bessborough, her mother-in-law Lady Melbourne – even, eventually, to Byron himself. The Hollands were unfussed by the affair, remaining tolerant and uncritical through all its ups and downs. They had grown very fond of Byron, and he of them. Still repentant for his insulting lines in English Bards and Scots Reviewers – ‘I wish I had not been in such a hurry with that confounded satire,’ he wrote – he dedicated his poem The Bride of Abydos to Lord Holland, and was a constant visitor to Holland House. Of all the circles he moved in, the Hollands’, he thought, was ‘the first – everything distingué is welcome there’, and Lady Holland, when in a good humour, was perfect. ‘No one more agreable, or perhaps so ‌much so, when she will.’¹¹

Lady Holland, however, was not always in a good humour and 1812 was a particularly difficult year for her. In July she gave birth to another daughter, her tenth child. The baby only lived a few hours, and she herself took a long time to recover. She suffered from bouts of depression and ill health for ever after, and often took it out on those around her; even Holland was not immune from her sharp tongue. This was nothing new. Lady Bessborough, an amused observer of their life together, records a couple of angry scenes between them, in both of which she was indirectly involved.

The first took place some years before when Lady Holland tried to prevent her husband calling on the Bessboroughs on their way home from Westminster one evening. When he attempted to stop the coach and go on foot, she flew into a violent rage, forbidding the footman to open the door, telling everyone in the coach that he had lost his wits, and that they should call for Dr Willis, the king’s doctor, to shave and blister his head. ‘As all this was done angrily and not in joke, he was provok’d and in spite of all her commands to the contrary, jump’d out and came to C. Square [the Bessboroughs’ house in Cavendish Square]. When he return’d home he found a ‌bed order’d for him downstairs.’¹²

On a second occasion, when the Hollands and various friends had called, and Lady Holland was busy talking to Lord Lauderdale in a corner, Holland whispered to Lady Bessborough that if she could steal a candle, they might slip away to play chess in the next room. They proceeded to do so very quietly, enjoying the sense of playing truant.

But, like most other concealments this was soon discovered, and we were made to pay for our amusement. She was seriously angry with us both – quite painfully so with him, and ended by saying she should come no more. He rebell’d a little and said he would come when she went to the Opera, but she ‌said she would forbid it.¹³

Lady Bessborough does not tell us how this second episode concluded, but Holland was good at sidestepping and usually more amused than otherwise by his wife’s tempestuous ways. He was still as much in love with her as ever, as a poem he wrote soon after makes clear:

The morning dawned and by my side

Spite of impending day

In sleep, that night and care defied

My sweet enchantress lay

Closed were indeed those sparkling eyes

That set my soul on fire

But other charms in slumber rise

To kindle fierce desire

The grace of her reclining head

That even heaving breast

And limbs so carelessly outspread

Ten thousand thoughts suggest.

Yet passion in my bosom strove

Unruly at the sight

And fain my rude and boisterous love

Had wakened her to delight

No, let the thought, I cried, be check’t

The sacrilege forbear

Love shall those tender looks respect

That heavenly slumber spare.

I said then bending o’er her charms

With fondness I explore

How soft how fair a spirit warms

The being I adore

For oh her lovely smiles express

The image of her mind

She looks, and sure she lives no ‌less

Calm innocent, and kind—¹⁴

Perhaps there was an element of poetic licence in the final line, but Lady Holland, for all her tantrums and caprices, was often genuinely kind. We see her, for instance, offering an anonymous loan to the impoverished poet Thomas Campbell, arranging to do so through a friend in order not to humiliate him by offering it herself, and she brought the same surprising delicacy to many other unsung acts of generosity. She also used her influence, as we have seen in the case of Sydney Smith, to help her friends, and to intimates, like Lady Bessborough and her wayward daughter Caroline, she was endlessly loyal and uncensorious. And even though a London pharmacist claimed to have invented a pill for people who had been frightened at Holland House, those who knew it best enjoyed the extra zest her sharp tongue gave it, and were well able to hold their own. ‘Ring the bell, Sydney,’ she once commanded Smith. ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘and shall I ‌sweep the floor as well?’¹⁵ No one knew better than Smith how to handle her, and his letters, with their teasingly affectionate tone, struck the perfect note. ‘How very odd, dear Lady Holl,’ he writes on one occasion,

to ask me to dine with you on Sunday, the 9th when I am coming to stay with you from the 5th to the 11th! It is like giving a gentleman an assignation for Wednesday when you are going to marry him on the Sunday preceding – an attempt to combine the stimulus of gallantry with the security of connubial relations. I do not propose to be guilty of the slightest infidelity to you while I am at H H except you dine in town, and then it will not be infidelity but spirited recrimination,

Ever the sincere and affectionate friend of Lady Holland,

‌Sydney Smith¹⁶