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‌‘A House of All Europe’

THE popular reaction to the trial of Queen Caroline had shown that whatever the repressive intentions of the Six Acts, public opinion could not be ignored. Meanwhile the government itself was beginning to undergo a transformation. Lord Liverpool, after presiding for ten years over what Macaulay described as ‘the most reactionary team of ministers ever assembled for the direction of public affairs’ was turning to new men. Robert Peel replaced Lord Sidmouth (as Addington had become) as Home Secretary and began a massive reform of criminal law; the suicide of Castlereagh in 1822 left the way open for the more liberal Canning to become Foreign Secretary; Canning’s chief supporter William Huskisson became President of the Board of Trade and set about dismantling the cumbersome system of tariffs and duties which were hampering free trade.

It seemed as though the liberal Tories had stolen the Whigs’ clothes. Only the issues of Catholic Emancipation and parliamentary reform remained unsolved. On the subject of Catholic Emancipation the ministry had agreed to differ, some like Canning supporting it, others like Peel and Wellington strongly opposed to any change. But since George IV was now as much against it as his father, and would not allow it to be raised in Cabinet, the question was left in abeyance. The last chance of conciliating the Irish before they took matters into their own hands was rapidly slipping away.

The issue of parliamentary reform offered better opportunities for the Whigs. With just a handful of radical members in the Commons and none in the Lords, they were able to present themselves as the only party which could channel the growing demands for reform through Parliament. By making electoral reform a condition of their taking office (unlikely while George IV was alive) they could take the credit for being reformers and at the same time keep the movement under control. ‘However small the quantum of reform you propose,’ wrote Holland to Grey in November 1820, ‘if proposed directly and made a sine qua non it gives you should it be resisted all the advantages of having proposed reform to the fullest extent with the public, and it gives the country the advantage of enlisting the popular cry under the banner of ‌moderate, practical and useful reform.’¹ In other words the Whigs could make the running either way.

Holland House as usual played its role in keeping up morale. ‘The meeting of Parliament and a few Holland House dinners may perhaps ‌put some life into us,’² wrote Tierney, now leader of the Whigs in the Commons, to Grey at one low moment. Of course it was not the only centre for Whig politics. There were meetings and discussions in many places: at Brooks’s Club, where Fox’s portrait by Reynolds presided in the entrance hall; at Devonshire House, where the bachelor Duke of Devonshire kept up the traditions of his mother Georgiana, and lent his support though not his voice – for he never spoke in the Lords – to the Whig cause; at Lansdowne House and Bowood in Wiltshire, where the third Marquess of Lansdowne, an intellectual like his father the first marquess, had gathered a coterie of savants and political economists; in the palatial country houses of Whig magnates like the Duke of Bedford and Lord Fitzwilliam, who held whole counties under their sway. But nowhere had quite the glamour of Holland House. There were even some MPs, wrote Tierney, who would not vote unless they had been asked to dinner there.

Since the end of the war Holland House had expanded its European horizons too. Just as Fox had been a European figure, a symbol of free speech in a reactionary age, so Holland House had become a rallying point for European liberalism, ‘a house of all Europe’, as the diarist Charles Greville described it. In part this was due to the cosmopolitan outlook of the Hollands themselves: they shared a gift for languages and love of foreign travel and in their many journeys abroad had got to know the leading political and intellectual figures of the countries they visited. Opinionated but immensely well informed, they almost ran a separate foreign policy from Holland House.

At times their influence was entirely benevolent. For instance, when the Hollands were staying in Verona during the Hundred Days, they had renewed their acquaintance with the former Spanish prime minister Godoy, who was living under the protection of the exiled Charles IV of Spain. The Hollands had always liked Godoy and when he lamented to Holland that his position in Italy would be very precarious if Charles IV died and asked if there might be a chance of asylum in England, Holland promised he would try to help. Four years later, when Charles IV died, Holland approached the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, on Godoy’s behalf, and obtained permission for him to come to England as a private citizen. Godoy’s response, wrote Holland in his Foreign Reminiscences, was as follows:

He had for many years disposed of the resources of one of the richest kingdoms in Europe, he had made the fortunes of thousands and thousands, but I was the only mortal who since his fall, had expressed or shown recollection of any service, great or small, received from him. I might therefore judge of the pleasure ‌my letter had given him.³

In the event Godoy was allowed to stay in Italy but the episode showed Holland – and Liverpool – at his best. Other foreign interventions were less happy. Holland, as we have seen, had taken a close interest in the creation of the Spanish constitution in the years between 1809 and 1812, and he and Allen, who had made himself an expert on the matter, had been in frequent correspondence with the leading Spanish liberals. In April 1815, when the future constitution of Naples was in question Holland and Allen sketched out a series of similar proposals for Joachim Murat, who was still in charge. Unfortunately their courier was stopped by the Austrian authorities in Lucca and the draft constitution ended up in Vienna. Since Murat was shortly afterwards overthrown by Austrian forces in favour of the legitimate king, Ferdinand IV, Holland’s attempts to interfere not only embarrassed the British government at a difficult point in their relations with Austria, but scandalized political allies like the Grenvillites for whom, in the words of Grenville’s brother, Thomas, this ‌‘scrawling out [of] Italian constitutions’⁴ was totally unacceptable.

In 1823 Naples was once more at the centre of a controversy, one in which, though unintentionally, Holland caused further offence. Revolution had broken out in Naples and its twin kingdom of Sicily, and Ferdinand IV had been forced to agree to a liberal constitution. Fearing that the revolutionary contagion might spread, the three leading powers of the so-called Holy Alliance – Russia, Austria and Prussia – met Ferdinand at the Congress of Laibach and agreed to send Austrian troops to support him. Promptly rescinding his promise of a constitution, Ferdinand made the most of the Austrian presence to embark on a savage purge of the liberals who had opposed him.

The British had never joined the Holy Alliance, regarding it as visionary and impractical, and though the British ambassador Lord Stewart attended the congress he refused to support its decisions. Holland went further in the House of Lords, where he played, he admitted, perhaps an ‘imprudent and intemperate’ role in denouncing the policies of the Holy Alliance. In particular, he pointed out the inconsistency of Tsar Alexander I, who owed his own throne to a revolution, in condemning the risings in Italy. (In 1801 Alexander had been staying in the palace where his father, the mad Tsar Paul I, was assassinated; he had known of the plot to depose him but not, apparently, of his intended murder.) The subject was so sensitive that Holland was called to order by the President of the Council before he had time to finish his sentence. What he meant to say, he claimed, was

that it ill became him [the Tsar] to charge those who derived their power from insurrection or mutiny with being necessarily accessories after the fact to the preparation of a crime when he himself was sitting on a throne reeking with the blood of his father, and would by a parity of reasoning, be exposed to the unfounded or, at least, questionable imputation of being cognizant ‌and responsible for the murder.⁵

Cut short before the qualifying final clause, the sentence implied that Alexander had been privy to his father’s death. It was a saying of the unsayable that caused a diplomatic uproar. Pozzo di Borgo, the Russian ambassador in Paris and an old friend of Holland’s, announced that he could no longer receive him or accept his invitations; Prince Lieven, the Russian ambassador in London, was said to be considering challenging him to a duel; Princess Lieven, till then a frequent visitor, cut off all further intercourse with Holland House. Lady Holland was beside herself; she had not slept since it happened, reported Creevey two days later. Holland did his best to smooth things over by publishing an anonymous explanation of the misunderstanding in the Times – ‘a peace offering to the Emperor of all the Russias, the Lievens ‌and the Princess of Madagascar’,⁶ as Creevey put it. But in private he was unrepentant. ‘Whether Alexander knew of Paul’s murder or not’, he wrote to Lord William Russell some months later,

I think he has done much worse things than that lately… Madame de Lieven who is a sensible woman and not a Russian [she was a Baltic German] knows very well that the Czar and his subjects when they mix with Europeans ne font que jouer la comédie and that even the anger of being accused of murder is but an affectation of sentiment to which they are [as] utterly strangers, as the religious horrors or devotion of Talma [the ‌actor] in Oedipe or Hippolytus.⁷

It was not until after Alexander’s death in 1826 that the Lievens felt able to see the Hollands again. Prince Lieven was no great loss. He was a colourless man whose favourite expression (and nickname in London) was ‘Vraiment’. His wife, however, was a clever and fascinating woman, a former mistress of Metternich, who loved dabbling in English affairs and whose confidants ranged from Grey to Wellington and George IV. Holland House, with its cosmopolitan and political mix was a perfect setting for her talents and she must have been delighted when the time came to return.

There were always defections from Holland House as visitors took offence for one reason or another, though few of them stayed away for ever. Brougham, a favourite in the first days of the Edinburgh Review, had suddenly stopped going there in 1810, returning just as suddenly six years later on the condition that no one ask the reason for his absence. Holland, who had helped him find a seat in Parliament, had been wounded at his defection, but the estrangement was probably due to a quarrel with his wife. Brougham objected to her political interference; the idea of ‘carrying on the party by a coterie at Lady Holland’s elbow’, he once told Creevey, ‘cannot be ‌submitted to for a moment.’⁸

Canning was another friend of Holland’s who fell by the wayside. Excluded by his birth, he felt, from high office under the Whigs, he had chosen to follow Pitt instead while continuing to share the Whig aims of Catholic Emancipation and the abolition of slavery. His intimacy with Holland dated back to their days at Eton and Oxford and though their political paths had diverged, they retained a fondness for each other. It was one which Lady Holland did not share; she was jealous of their early friendship and regarded Canning as a traitor to the Foxite cause. Holland’s feelings were more complex. He had too much goodwill towards Canning, he once explained, to be ‘a fair and impartial judge of ‌the propriety of attacking him’⁹ in debate. But it was only very seldom that Canning came to Holland House.

Even Creevey, whose gossipy letters and diaries give us some of our most amusing glimpses of Holland House, was sometimes driven to rebel. In 1820, for instance, he had stayed away for several months in protest at Lady Holland’s attitude of ‘virtuous indignation’ against Queen Caroline. He had needed some persuading to return. ‘Lord Holland came up to me in Brooks’s yesterday and reproached me for never coming near my lady,’ he reported to his stepdaughter; ‘and after saying many civil things to me in his pretty manner, said I should go and see her with him. So I did, and she ‌was all civility and humility.’¹⁰

It was only a temporary victory. Humility was not Lady Holland’s style. But her sharp tongue and domineering ways, the source of endless anecdotes, were as much the spice of Holland House as her husband’s learning and delightful conversation. Familiars loved complaining of their hostess. For instance, wrote Creevey,

In addition to all her further insults on the town, she has set up a huge cat which is never permitted to be out of her sight, and to whose vagaries she requires unqualified submission. Rogers, it seems, has already sustained considerable injury in a personal affair with this animal, Brougham only keeps him or her at arm’s length by snuff, and Luttrell has sent in his formal resignation of all further visits till this odious favourite ‌is dismissed from the Cabinet.¹¹

The old familiars did not change, spreading out from the inner circle of Whig relations and grandees: Allen of course, the witty dilettante Henry Luttrell, Samuel Rogers, Sydney Smith, Francis Jeffrey and Tom Moore. But the company was constantly being replenished. Men of science like Sir Humphry Davy and Alexander von Humboldt; the political economist Thomas Malthus; painters like David Wilkie, Edwin Landseer and Thomas Lawrence; Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse; the American writer Washington Irving; the Scottish historian Sir James Mackintosh; the great Shakespearean actor John Philip Kemble; foreign diplomats; Spanish liberals; French intellectuals; exiled royalty; rising politicians – all passed through Holland House at one time or another, their names neatly entered in the dinner book by Allen. Music was the only exception in the array of talents represented there. Holland, like Fox before him, was decidedly unmusical, and his wife went along with his tastes.

There was one great gap in the circle. In November 1821 Lady Bessborough died suddenly in Florence, where she had been nursing a dying grandchild. Ten years older than Lady Holland, she had been her most intimate friend, not above making fun of her absurdities, but always witty, loving and supportive. Even her daughter Caroline’s behaviour had done nothing to make a rift between them. ‘I have been dreadfully shocked by the acct. which arrived [by] this post from Florence,’ Lady Holland wrote to her son Henry. ‘I feel her great ‌kindness rush upon my recollection.’¹² It was the end of a friendship that went back to the carefree days in Italy nearly 30 years earlier when she and Holland had first fallen in love, and something of their youth died with her.