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‌At Home at Holland House

APART from his interventions on behalf of Napoleon, most of Holland’s political activities in 1816 and 1817 took place behind the scenes. Thanks to the Edinburgh Review and liberal papers like the Times and Morning Chronicle, Whig opinions were becoming widely read and the name of Charles James Fox was still a rallying cry at Whig clubs across the country. In London, ‘Fox Club’ dinners to celebrate Fox’s birthday took place yearly, sometimes at Brooks’s Club, sometimes at Holland House, with Holland usually presiding. Elsewhere the clubs were fairly transient, often dying out after a few years, but they helped to form a body of opinion outside Parliament. Since the regent still refused to contemplate a Whig government, the Whigs’ best hope lay in changing the system altogether. The idea of electoral reform was once more in the air. William Cobbett’s radical paper the Weekly Register called for universal suffrage and annual parliaments. The Whigs had more limited aims, but for the first time since the 1790s they began to take them seriously.

In 1816 and 1817, however, the most immediate questions before Parliament were those of taxation and domestic unrest. The Liverpool government’s attempt to continue the unpopular wartime property tax was roundly defeated by a combination of the Whigs and its own supporters. But the Whigs were less successful in preventing the suspension of habeas corpus in February 1817, a measure, thought Holland, which would lead to ‘a complete surrender and extinction ‌of our laws and liberties’.¹ After the first post-war euphoria, bad harvests and economic distress had led to widespread disturbances, the government responding to what Holland called its ‘silly alarms of revolution’ by increased repression. Although the Foxite Whigs, among them Lord John Russell in a notable maiden speech, opposed the suspension vigorously, Grenville and his followers voted with the government. The 12-year alliance between Grey and Grenville was unravelling.

Holland was in the midst of the party’s discussions. Grey, the leader, unwell and threatening resignation, was hard to prise away from his home and family in Northumberland and it often fell to Holland to be his go-between in London. His loyalty to Grey as Fox’s successor and leader of the party was absolute; modesty and perhaps a certain indolence kept him from any ambition to replace him. But Holland House, in Grey’s absence, was an essential meeting place, not only for the Foxite Whigs but for those of kindred sympathies, liberal Tories and the less extreme among the radicals in Parliament. Consensus might not be achieved, but at least some form of opposition was kept alive.

Since 1815 the Whigs had suffered two major losses. The first, a few weeks after Waterloo, had been the suicide of Samuel Whitbread, triggered, it was hinted, by the news of Napoleon’s defeat, though the official explanation was that it was due to overwork in untangling the affairs of Drury Lane. A fervent admirer of Napoleon, Whitbread had been one of the most radical and energetic of the Foxite MPs, and like Grey (whose sister he had married) was a founder member of the Society of the Friends of the People. But his origins as the son of a wealthy brewer and the sneers they aroused in Parliament and the press had been stumbling blocks in his career; an element of paranoia, not altogether unjustified, may have lain behind his death. Its shocking circumstances – he cut his throat – left his parliamentary colleagues reeling.

With the death of Sheridan the following year, the last of Fox’s great contemporaries left the scene. Though often annoying the Foxites by his insistence on following his own line, he had shared their political ideals of Catholic Emancipation and parliamentary reform, and had fought untiringly for civil liberties by Fox’s side. For all his faults, his debts, his drunkenness, he had been, as Holland put it, ‘the wonder of the age’, unrivalled as a playwright, an orator and a wit. Holland was a pall-bearer at his funeral at Westminster Abbey; the magnificence of the occasion, with the mourners led by two royal dukes, was in painful contrast to the misery and poverty of Sheridan’s final days.

In June 1817, as soon as Parliament stopped sitting, the Hollands set out on their travels again. It was a good moment for a change of scene; the last two years in politics had been unproductive and frustrating. They travelled in style, taking five coaches and nine servants, including a cook and a confectioner, as well as their three younger children (Charles, the eldest, was stationed in Corfu), a tutor and the inevitable Dr Allen. The size of their party when they travelled, wrote Caroline Lamb, was enough to start rumours of an invasion.

After touring the newly united Kingdom of the Netherlands – ‘there is too much water in this ‌country for a nervous person,’² wrote Lady Holland from Amsterdam – they installed themselves in Paris for an extended stay. ‘The soirées at Lady Holland’s are very agreeable,’ wrote Harriet Cavendish, now Lady Granville – her husband Granville Leveson-Gower had been made Viscount Granville in 1815. At one point the two families took separate floors at the Hôtel de Paris, where Lady Granville found Lady Holland, ‘enthroned in a room of green and gold’, complaining vociferously because the proprietor would not allow her cook to enter the kitchen. Lord Holland, ‘a great love and a great grig’, was as adorable as ever: ‘There is something so very delightful in the artless, almost childish simplicity of his character, when united to a ‌mind and understanding like his.’³

Paris was full of English friends, presided over by the British ambassador Sir Charles Stuart. Caroline Fox and Elizabeth Vernon came over to join the fun. The two ladies, wrote Holland, ‘spend all their mornings at Milliners, haberdashers, feather makers and upholsterers, then they dine at Ambassadors and Ministers, and go to one or even ‌two spectacles in the evenings.’⁴ For the Hollands it was a chance to take the temperature of French politics. Madame de Staël had died a few weeks before their arrival, but her former lover, Benjamin Constant, creator of the constitution during Napoleon’s brief return from Elba and now a liberal deputy, was one of their most frequent contacts. So too were Lafayette, who had recently emerged from retirement to become a liberal deputy, and Talleyrand, who, having saved France’s frontiers at the Congress of Vienna, had been forced out of politics after Waterloo but remained a shrewd observer from the sidelines. The great question of the day was the continuing presence of the allied troops in Paris (which the Foxites had strongly opposed) but in the long term it was the future of the monarchy which raised most doubts. Holland’s distrust of the Bourbons was instinctive. ‘I am more than ever persuaded,’ he told Charles, ‘the Bourbons will not last unless they can do one of two things: wage a successful war or give themselves the air of reigning by the revolution and ‌not in spite of it.’⁵

The Hollands returned to England on 18 November to the news of the death in childbirth of the Prince Regent’s only daughter, Princess Charlotte, three days before. Everyone they met on the road from Dover to London, including post boys and turnpike men, was wearing some kind of mourning. But the outburst of grief produced by her death, thought Holland, was more an indication of the unpopularity of the Prince Regent and his brothers ‘than of the childish affection for Royalty, which the people ‌of England so frequently display’.⁶ The regent’s heir was now the Duke of York, and since he had no children there was a flurry among his younger brothers to marry and produce an heir. The Duke of Clarence (later William IV) abandoned his long-term mistress, Mrs Jordan, to marry a German princess, and the Duke of Kent was forced to do the same.

Meanwhile the Hollands settled back in at Holland House. It was now 20 years since they had moved there, and there had been many additions and improvements. The library, numbering some 10,000 volumes, was constantly being added to: Holland’s Spanish collection, in particular, was said to be the best in England. The portraits of past friends and statesmen, collected by the first Lord Holland, had been joined by those of their own friends: Grey, Lansdowne, Tierney, Lord John Russell, Rogers, Moore and many others. Most notable of all was a seated statue of Fox in classical dress in the entrance hall, a cast of the original by Sir Richard Westmacott erected by the Duke of Bedford in Bloomsbury Square.

The house’s foundations, which had been threatened by underground springs, had been stabilized by a new system of drainage but not before alarming rents – ‘i nostri cracks’ as the Italian supervisor Serafino Bonaiuti described them – had appeared in the west wing, and the library fireplace had begun to move. A few years later the construction of a corner addition at the south end of the library wall helped support the building further, as well as providing a small inner library on the first floor.

In 1810 Bonaiuti, who seems to have been a man of many talents, designed the Portuguese garden, on the west side of the house; now known as the Dutch garden, its formal layout with zigzagging paths and box-edged flower beds is still virtually unchanged. Unchanged too is the inscription in the little arbour, set into the long espaliered wall beside the formal garden, which was Samuel Rogers’s favourite retreat at Holland House:

Here Rogers sat, and here forever dwell

With thee the pleasures that he knew so well.

‘The Pleasures of Memory’, as we know, was Rogers’s most famous poem; the two lines are by Holland.

Lady Holland took great pleasure in the gardens at Holland House, returning with delight to ‘the fresh air, verdure and singing birds… after the ‌dense vapours, gaslights and din’⁷ of city life. In summer its borders were bright with dahlias, a flower she is credited for having introduced into England, bringing back the seeds from Spain, where they had recently arrived from Mexico, after her visit there in 1804. Her husband celebrated her initiative in verse:

The Dahlia you brought to our isle

Your praises forever should speak:

Mid gardens as sweet as your smile,

And in colour ‌as bright as your cheek.⁸

Like his wife, Holland loved the house’s gardens and the woods and fields surrounding them. But he took only the mildest interest in running the estate. He introduced a flock of merino sheep, which he had purchased in Spain in 1809, to Kensington but on the whole left farming to his manager. It was just as well. As far as sheep, ‘that particular animal by whose destruction mutton is obtained’, were concerned, Sydney Smith once told him, he betrayed the most profound and ludicrous ignorance. ‘You are a statesman, a scholar and a ‌wit, but not a butcher.’⁹

On the east side of the park was Little Holland House. Formerly a farm, its land had been added to the demesne by Holland’s father. In 1803, the house was leased to Caroline Fox and their step-aunt, Elizabeth Vernon, ‘Aunt Ebey’, as they called her. The two women lived there together for 25 years, their presence providing a comforting backdrop for the Holland children when their parents were away. Lady Holland, despite occasional moments of irritation, got on well with Caroline and some of her best and most interesting letters from abroad were written to her sister-in-law.

In February 1818, Holland’s maternal uncle and former guardian, the Earl of Upper Ossory, died. Having amply provided for his daughters and two illegitimate children, he left his estate of Ampthill to Holland – a bequest, wrote Holland, ‘munificent enough in itself, and to me beyond all value, from recollection of those who had inhabited it, and of the happy hours, days, months and years I ‌had spent in their society.’¹⁰ In the long run the expense of keeping up the estate would prove a heavy burden, but the unexpected legacy was a further tribute – if one were needed – to the affection he inspired.

The following year brought a still more painful loss. In September 1819 the Holland’s youngest daughter Georgiana, aged ten, became seriously ill with what turned out to be tubercular peritonitis. Lady Holland, who feared the worst, was driven almost beyond endurance by the well-meant cheerfulness of the ladies of Little Holland House, who pooh-poohed her anxieties, and seemed to laugh at her ‘folly of feeling and fearing’. For the first time since she had known them, she told her son Henry, she was glad to hear their carriage leave. ‘I cannot bear up when my heart is almost broken to hear fine strung phrases, and talk, upon talk, upon such disciplined minds and feelings. When I am wretched I have no control, and I like those best who fluctuate ‌in my hopes & fears.’¹¹

Georgiana died on 1 November. She was ten years old.

‘Lord and Lady Holland are in very great affliction,’ wrote Allen to the Whig MP Thomas Creevey, ‘and you who know the dear little girl they have lost and how much they were attached to her, will not wonder at their sorrow. At present Lady Holland bears the loss with greater firmness, but she will feel ‌it through her whole life.’¹²

Allen had adored Georgiana, his favourite in the family, and had been with her throughout her illness. She was buried at Millbrook, near Holland’s childhood home at Ampthill, and a marble bust of her by Westmacott, the small head crowned with snowdrops, was erected in her memory in the church. Allen kept a replica of it in his study at Holland House.

In the midst of the family’s distress there was a further bitter twist for Lady Holland. ‘I have received an anonymous letter,’ she told Henry,

full of triumph at my misfortune denouncing the vengeance of God that my darling being [taken] was a judgement on me for being a worthless mother and tyrant wife… and foretelling that my husband will be snatched from me and you all… I am at a loss to conjecture who could bear such malice towards me, or indeed be so full of malice against any human ‌being at such a moment.¹³

No one ever discovered the author of the letter, but it may well be that Caroline Lamb’s cruel portrait of her in Glenarvon helped create the hostile climate which made its writing possible. In some sections of society she had never been forgiven for her divorce; there were also those, her eldest son Webby among them, who felt it had driven her husband Sir Godfrey to suicide. She put on a bold face to the world, but she had had much to suffer from its slights. The Holland House salon was in its way her recompense; the more successful it became the more she denied her exclusion elsewhere. And her husband’s devotion never wavered, the tragedy, if anything, bringing them still closer. Breaking the news of Georgiana’s death to Charles in Corfu, Holland paid fresh tribute to her qualities: ‘Much as I have always thought of your Mama’s goodness of heart & strength of mind her conduct to me & all of us on this heart-breaking occasion has raised my opinion of it & I adore her ‌more than ever I did.’¹⁴