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‌Defenders of Napoleon

THE Hollands had landed in England at the very moment that Napoleon, on board the warship Bellerophon, was waiting outside Plymouth to hear the government’s decision on his fate. He never set foot on British soil. After 11 days of uncertainty he was transferred to the Northumberland in preparation for the voyage to St Helena: a five-month journey lay ahead. The Hollands deplored the government’s ‘ungenerous decision’ but knew that public opinion was on its side. All they could do was to try to mitigate the conditions of Napoleon’s imprisonment, and if possible influence opinion in his favour.

Their first task was to win the sympathies of Sir Hudson Lowe, who had just been nominated as governor of St Helena. Within a fortnight of their return the Hollands had launched a charm offensive. Between 18 August, when he first dined there, and 23 January, when he sailed for St Helena, Lowe was invited to dinner at Holland House eight times, the guests including the regent’s brother the Duke of York, Byron, still at the height of his celebrity, the ever-present Samuel Rogers, Lord Lansdowne, Lord John Russell, who had actually visited Napoleon on Elba, and, to add a touch of patriotic colour, Lady Holland’s son Henry Webster, who had fought at Waterloo.

How could Lowe fail to be charmed by such distinguished company, and by the flattering attentions of his hosts? But there were important counter-influences. Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War, in charge of Napoleon’s fate, was a hard-headed Tory and not above making jokes about the Hollands. The government’s instructions for Lowe were clear. Napoleon was to be treated as a prisoner of war, not a former emperor. He was to be addressed as General Bonaparte; no letters or parcels should be sent to him except through the Secretary of State. Lowe was a stickler for the rules; he was also mindful that Napoleon had escaped from Elba through the laxness of the governor, Colonel Campbell. Lady Holland’s tactful pleas that some informal arrangement might be made to send minor comforts to Napoleon ‘in the interests of humanity’ fell on stony ground.

There were further complications when Lowe, encouraged by Bathurst, who felt that a wife would be an asset to the governor, married a colonel’s widow, Mrs Johnson. He knew he must either offend the court by taking her to Holland House, or Lady Holland by not doing so. Fortunately the marriage took place not long before they sailed, and when, in a last attempt to win Lowe round, Lady Holland asked them both to dinner, Lady Lowe was able to decline politely, on the grounds that she was overwhelmed with preparations for the voyage. Sir Hudson came alone. His manner was reserved, as well it might be. Only a few days before he had co-signed a letter with the Lord Chancellor to the Undersecretary at War, Sir Henry Bunbury, advocating a bill to outlaw Napoleon for life. It was clear that the Holland House attempt to win his sympathies had failed.

Lady Holland hid her chagrin. It was essential to remain on good terms with Lowe, if only as a future channel of communication. Her husband moved to the attack in Parliament. On 8 April 1816, during the debates on the bill for ‘the more effective detaining in custody of Bonaparte’ he entered a vigorous protest against Napoleon’s treatment in the Journal of the House of Lords:

To consign to distant exile and imprisonment a foreign and captive chief who after the abdication of his authority, relying on British generosity, had surrendered himself to us in preference to his other enemies, is unworthy the magnanimity of a great country – and the treaties by which, after his captivity, we bound ourselves to retain him in custody at the will of sovereigns to whom he had never surrendered himself, appear to me to be repugnant to the principles of equity, and ‌utterly uncalled for by expedience.¹

It was a solitary protest which he knew would make him unpopular with both the court and the country; to the vast majority of the public the name of Napoleon was anathema. Knowing the state of public opinion, the rest of the Whig party made no comment on the bill, though to the great annoyance of the Prince Regent, his eccentric brother the Duke of Sussex, an ardent Whig supporter, added his signature to Holland’s entry.

Meanwhile news was beginning to come through from St Helena. In September 1816, Dr Warden, the surgeon of the Northumberland, arrived in England and dined at Holland House. It may have been through him that Count Montholon’s Remonstrance (in fact written by Napoleon) complaining of the harsh conditions of the emperor’s captivity, reached England. It was published amid wide publicity early in 1817, and echoed soon after, though in far milder terms, when Holland called for an inquiry on the matter in the House of Lords on 8 March. He knew he must tread delicately in order not to embarrass his fellow Whigs, and he was not, as he said, such a ‘coxcomb’ as to think the decision on Napoleon’s exile could be reversed. But reports seemed to show that the restrictions on Napoleon – on his freedom of movement, by confining him to the unhealthy high ground of the island, on his finances, by forcing him to sell his plate to provide essentials for his entourage, and on his right to communicate and receive letters and newspapers – were unnecessarily severe. The blame, if it existed, lay with the government, not Lowe, ‘the gallant officer… with many of whose good qualities he had the good ‌fortune to be personally acquainted’.²

It was a tactful and moderate speech, and though it was shot down by Bathurst, it may well have helped to improve the terms of Napoleon’s imprisonment. Several members of his family, including Napoleon’s mother, wrote grateful letters to thank Holland for his intervention. Lord Bathurst’s office began to be more flexible in allowing parcels and letters to go through, and Lady Holland took full advantage of the change in mood. Over the next four years of Napoleon’s exile she sent him more than 1,000 books and periodicals, among them regular copies of the Edinburgh Review, which Napoleon followed eagerly. (For some time he hoped that a change of government and the return of the Whigs to power might put an end to his captivity.) There were other comforts from Holland House – food, eau de Cologne, a microscope, even seeds for the garden of his residence at Longwood. A special gift of sugared plums, ‘les pruneaux de Lady Holland’, was almost the last thing he asked for. Meanwhile Canova’s bronze bust of Napoleon had arrived from Rome and had been set up on a column of Scotch granite in the garden of Holland House. Four lines in Greek from the Odyssey were inscribed on the column beneath; Holland would translate them as follows:

He is not dead, he breathes the air

In lands beyond the deep,

Some distant sea-girt island where

Harsh men the hero keep.

The Hollands’ sympathy for Napoleon extended to his supporters. Holland did his best to save the life of Marshal Ney, sponsoring a desperate appeal for clemency from Ney’s wife to the Prince Regent (who ‘did not feel called to intervene’), and writing to his kinsman Lord Kinnaird in Paris asking him to intercede with Wellington on Ney’s behalf. This letter, arriving the day after Ney’s execution, was indiscreetly shown to Wellington, who took grave offence at a passage which, according to Holland, he mistakenly thought to be ‘an imputation upon him as jealous or fearful of the ‌military superiority of Marshal Ney’.³ Two years later, in Paris, Wellington cut Holland dead.

These initiatives, and the fact that Holland House continued to be a refuge for exiled Bonapartists, were enough to make even Holland’s friends uneasy. In 1817, when there was a suggestion that Grey might be retiring as leader of the opposition, Holland was not in the running to replace him. ‘Lord Holland is here,’ wrote the Whig politician John Wishaw, discussing possible alternatives, ‘but he is considered too violent and an outcry has been attempted against him with some success as a ‌friend of Bonaparte and France.’⁴

Byron had shared the Hollands’ sympathy for Napoleon. ‘I am ‌damned sorry to hear it,’⁵ had been his response to the news of Waterloo. During their wooing of Lowe in the autumn of 1815, he and his new wife Annabella had twice dined with the Hollands to meet him. It was a new departure for Annabella. Three years before, when her cousin Caroline Lamb had invited her to a party where Lady Holland would be present, she had been dubious whether to accept. ‘If I am asked to be introduced to Lady Holland’s acquaintance I shall certainly decline,’ she told her mother, ‘but I think you will agree with me that no one will regard me as being corrupted by being in ‌the same room as her.’⁶

Since then her attitude had changed. Had her marriage lasted she too might have become a familiar figure at Holland House. As it was, it was to Holland that her adviser Dr Lushington turned as an intermediary, when the question of her separation from Byron first arose in January 1816. Reluctant to be involved at first, Holland good-naturedly agreed to write to Byron. He had the very best opinion, he assured him, of Lushington’s head and heart: ‘I am persuaded that his motives are most honourable both to ‌his client and to you.’⁷

‘There can be no subject – however unpleasant – which would not become less so – by you taking the trouble to ‌be the organ of communication,’⁸ wrote Byron gratefully. But neither Holland’s interventions nor those of anyone else could prevent the separation or divert the storm of scandal which broke round Byron’s head as rumours and speculations about his conduct multiplied. The British public, as Macaulay put it, was undergoing one of its periodic fits of morality. Shunned by the society that had idolized him, execrated by a vengeful Tory press, Byron left England on 25 April, never to return.

Throughout the painful months leading up to the judicial separation the Hollands had been consistently kind to Byron, refusing to join the outcry against him. Byron had always been devoted to them. Before his departure he presented Lady Holland with a collection of miniatures of subjects from his poems by the well-known illustrator and artist Thomas Stothard. She was reluctant to accept them at first, feeling he should give them to his wife, but Byron would not do so, insisting that they would only be seized by the bailiffs if she did not take them. Thereafter they hung in her private drawing room at Holland House, where favoured visitors would be taken to see them.

Some of Byron’s happiest times in London had been spent at Holland House, and he would look back on them fondly in his years of exile. ‘It is not my plan to be very long abroad…’ he wrote to Lady Holland in a farewell note, ‘and it does not much matter – in all times and all places I shall remember the kindness ‌of you and your Lord.’⁹ Not usually sentimental, Lady Holland kept a soft spot in her heart for Byron. ‘He was such a loveable person,’ she once told Moore. ‘I can remember him sitting there [in the library at Holland House] with the light ‌upon him, looking so beautiful.’¹⁰

It was not to be expected that Caroline Lamb would refrain from joining in the clamour against Byron. She was generous with dark hints – of Byron’s incest with his half-sister, of his homosexual entanglements – and her confidences to Annabella, under the guise of female solidarity, had done much to harden his wife’s attitude towards him. Ever since the end of her own affair with Byron Caroline had been working on a novel, Glenarvon, in which she would take her revenge on him. Its publication in May 1816 unleashed a fresh burst of scandal. A wild extravaganza, almost unreadable today, it succeeded as a ‘kiss and tell’ – or, as Byron put it rudely, ‘F— and publish’ – account of her affair, combining gothic romance, complete with ghosts and skeletons, with a satire on the Whig society in which she had been brought up. Byron, the fiendish but irresistible hero, is Glenarvon, a rebel Irish leader who betrays his country’s cause; Calantha, the doomed heroine, is Caroline herself. Among the supporting characters, Lady Holland is savagely caricatured as the Princess of Madagascar, the wife of the Nabob of that name.

Lady Holland, as we have seen, had always been tolerant of Caroline’s goings-on. But a few weeks before the book was published Caroline was involved in a new drama when she lost her temper with her pageboy and narrowly missed killing him by flinging a cricket ball at his head. The news of the incident naturally spread and Caroline was hustled off to the country in disgrace. Lady Holland had done her best to quieten gossip, but when Caroline, in one of her usual incoherent letters, wrote to thank her, she crisply replied that the less she spoke about ‘this unpleasant subject’ the better. ‘The anxiety your mother, William, and the Melbournes must feel should in my judgement occupy your thoughts much more than anything that I… or anybody else may ‌say or think about you.’¹¹

Caroline was furious; stung by Lady Holland’s letter, she no longer felt any compunction at wounding one of her mother’s oldest friends. We first meet the Princess of Madagascar in the novel when the ingenuous heroine, Calantha, is invited to dine at Barbary House, ‘an old-fashioned gothic building… three miles beyond the turnpike’.

Calantha now, for the first time, conversed with the learned of the land – she heard new opinions stated and old ones refuted, and she gazed, unhurt but not unawed, upon reviewers, poets, critics and politicians. At the end of a long gallery [the library] two thick wax tapers rendering ‘darkness visible’ the princess was seated. Few events, if any, were ever known to move her from her position… A poet of emaciated and sallow complexion [Samuel Rogers] stood beside her.

The princess receives Calantha graciously, charming her with sugared phrases, ‘nodding at intervals and dropping short epigrammatic sentences, when necessary, to such as were in attendance round her.’

‘Is she acting?’ says Calantha at length, in a whisper to the poet. ‘Is she acting or is this reality?’

‘It is the only reality you will ever find in the princess,’ he returns. ‘She acts the Princess of Madagascar from morning to night.’

‘But why,’ asks Calantha, ‘do the great Nabob and all the other Lords in waiting, with that black horde of savages—’

‘Reviewers, you mean, and men of talents.’

‘Well whatever they are tell me quickly why they wear collars and chains at Barbary House… I would die sooner than be thus enchained.’

‘The great Nabob,’ she is told, ‘is the best, the kindest, the cleverest man I know, but like some philosophers he would sacrifice much for a peaceable life. The princess is fond of inflicting these lesser tyrannies, she is so hopelessly attached to these trifles… that it were a pity to thwart her. For my own part I could willingly bend to the yoke, provided the duration were not eternal; for observe that the chains are well gilded, that the tables are well stored, and that those who bend the lowest are the best received.’

‘And if I also bow my neck,’ asks Calantha, ‘will she be grateful? May I depend upon her seeming kindness?’

The poet’s naturally pale complexion turns bluish-green at this enquiry.

So far the portrait, if unkind, has its elements of truth. But the story takes off into fantasy when the princess is revealed as a monster of deceit and treachery who leads the attack on Calantha when society turns against her.

Cold princess!… You taught Calantha to love you by every pretty art of which your sex is mistress… You laughed at her follies, courted her confidence and flattered her into a belief that you loved her. Loved her! – it is a feeling you never felt. She fell into the mire; the arrows of your precious crew were shot at her – like hissing snakes hot and sharpened with malice and venomed fire, and you – yes – you were the first to scorn her… aye and the fawning multitude which still crowd your door and laugh at you and despise you… The sun may fairly shine again on her: but never, never whilst existence is prolonged will she set foot in the gates of the palace of the Grand Nabob or trust to the smiles and professions ‌of the Princess of Madagascar.’¹²

Glenarvon was published anonymously, but everyone knew who had written it; its thinly disguised portraits of her family, friends and lover (even including some of Byron’s letters) completed Caroline’s social ruin. Holland was so indignant at her depiction of his wife that he turned his back on her when he next saw her. Lady Holland was deeply hurt by her ingratitude. ‘Every ridicule, every folly and infirmity (my not being able from malady to move about much) is portrayed,’ she told Mrs Creevey. ‘The charge against more essential qualities is, I trust and believe, a fiction; at least an uninterrupted friendship of 25 years with herself and family might leave me to suppose it… The work has a prodigious sale, ‌as all libellous matters have.’¹³

It was Caroline’s husband who suffered most. Miserably he wrote to Holland:

It must have seemed strange to you that I have not been to see you. And you may perhaps put a wrong construction on it – it is nothing but the embarrassment which the late events have not unnaturally revived. They have given me great trouble and embarrassment and produced an unwillingness to see anybody and more particularly those who have been objects of so wanton and unprofitable an attack. I did not write, because what could I say… I am sure you ‌will feel for my situation.¹⁴

Chivalrously Lamb refused to desert his wife, but no one held him responsible for her sins. Before long he was back at Holland House, as cheerful and clubbable as ever. Caroline, drink-sodden and unstable – but still capable of writing three more novels – remained in the country. She never went to Holland House again.