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‌Reforming Campaigns

FROM his vantage point of Holland House, closely in touch with many of its leading figures but without great personal ambition, Holland was ideally placed to observe and record the politics of his day. His two-volume Memoirs of the Whig Party During My Time, covering the period from his entry into Parliament in 1797 till 1809, his Foreign Reminiscences, describing his encounters with European royalty and politicians before and during the Napoleonic wars, and his Further Memoirs of the Whig Party, ending in 1823, have always been a mine of information for historians and biographers. Their Whig bias – pro-Fox, anti-royalty – was only to be expected, but his closeness to events and first-hand knowledge of the characters involved made them an invaluable source. They did not appear till after his death, the first three volumes mentioned being edited by his son Henry, but he had always intended them for publication. They were, he admitted, ‘rambling, desultory and imperfect’, but they were true, and related to subjects which, ‘having afforded amusement and instruction to the writer in the course of his life’, might be of possible interest ‘to some reader of similar habits ‌and tastes after its close’.¹

Holland’s model for his reminiscences, he tells us, was Horace Walpole, whose Memoirs of the Last Ten Years of the Reign of George II he edited and published in 1822; we must assume he began his own soon afterwards. Walpole had bequeathed his memoirs, together with a chest of papers, to the sixth Earl Waldegrave, who was not allowed to take possession of his legacy till he reached the age of 25. This had happened in 1810 and Holland had agreed to edit the memoirs – ‘ill written but entertaining, and from the dearth of all good histories of the ‌period 1751–1760, very readable’² – as well as editing those of the previous Earl Waldegrave, whose memoirs covered the same time span.

Walpole had died when Holland was 20. ‘I had from earliest youth,’ wrote Holland in his memoirs, ‘great curiosity about men remarkable for their literary attainments,’ and he had been flattered by the notice Walpole had taken of him on his occasional visits to London or Strawberry Hill. ‘In person,’ wrote Holland, ‘he was slender and prim, in his manners extremely artificial, and in his temper somewhat susceptible about trifles,’ and he quoted George Selwyn’s observation that the master of Strawberry Hill was the one of the best-preserved mummies in its collection of antiquities. But whatever the peculiarities of Walpole’s taste and character, his writing abounded in fascinating historical and literary material, the fruit of a long life spent in the company of statesmen, artists and wits. ‘No one employed as I have been in editing, and as I now am, in imitating his labours,’ wrote Holland, ‘can seriously wish to disparage one whom he shows himself willing ‌and perhaps unequal to emulating’.³

Such literary and historical activities were always part of Holland’s life. As well as his political memoirs, there were translations from Ariosto, Calderón and Lope de Vega; unfinished notes on Fox’s life and correspondence, later completed by Lord John Russell; a number of pamphlets on political issues; a journal of his time in office from 1831 to 1840 (not intended for publication and thus less formal than his memoirs); an extensive correspondence and a stream of occasional verse. Of course, by the standards of his friends from the Edinburgh Review he was an amateur, and he never pretended to be more. His greatest contribution lay in the way he animated others, in his passion for literature and history and in the breadth of his information. ‘I don’t suppose there is any Englishman living who covers so much ground as he ‌does – biographical, historical and anecdotal,’⁴ wrote Creevey, while Greville, returning home after an evening at Holland House, could only lament the inadequacies of his education:

I felt as if a language was spoken before me which I understood, but not enough to talk it myself. There was nothing discussed of which I was altogether ignorant, and when the merits of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Crabbe were brought into comparison and Lord Holland cut jokes upon Allen for his enthusiastic admiration of the ‘De Moribus Germanorum’, it was not that I had not read the poets or the historian, but that I felt I had not read them with profit. I have not that familiarity with either which enables me to discuss their merits, and a painful sense came over me of the difference between one who has superficially read and studied, and one who has laid a solid foundation in early youth… He who wastes his early years in horse racing and all sorts of idleness, figuring away among the dissolute and foolish, must be content to play an inferior part among ‌the learned and the wise.⁵

Central to the intellectual life at Holland House, and regarded as an oracle on literary matters, was John Allen, or ‘Jack’ as he was known in the family. Since he first joined the family in 1801, he had become an essential part of the household, his medical qualifications secondary as he grew into the role of librarian, comptroller and inseparable friend. It was he who organized the lists of dinner guests, assigned rooms to people who were staying and at dinner sat at the foot of the table to do the carving. (Lady Holland’s frequent criticisms from the other end of the table once led him to tell her to carve herself.) Although he contributed a number of learned articles to the Edinburgh Review, and thanks to the Hollands’ influence was appointed Master of Dulwich College in 1820, he was too devoted to the family, and perhaps too unambitious, to stray very far from their orbit. For Holland he was an invaluable adviser, whether in acquiring books or pictures or providing references for his speeches in the House of Lords, and he shared to the full his political ideals. Some of his ideas – for instance, the creation of life peers – were far ahead of his time and his views on Ireland, as expressed in the Edinburgh Review a few years after the Act of Union, would echo down the century:

She [England] has added about five millions to her population by her union with Ireland; and would to heaven we could say, that she had by that instance added in the same proportion to her strength and security; and that a blind and bigoted attachment to ancient prejudices, and a callous and disgusting indifference to the feelings and interests of so large a portion of her subjects, had not converted that which ought to have been her pride and strength, into her chief ‌source of weakness and apprehension.⁶

The problems of Ireland, where coercion seemed the only way to keep the peace, showed no signs of going away. One of the initiatives of which Holland was proudest was a bill which gave the Irish the same rights as the rest of the United Kingdom when accused of ‘overt acts of treason’: in Britain two witnesses were required to substantiate such a charge, in Ireland only one. Since treason was a capital offence, the difference could be a matter of life and death. In the summer of 1821, taking advantage of an admission by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon, that the law should be the same in all parts of the United Kingdom, Holland obtained his promise that he would not oppose a bill to amend it. The bill, which he introduced himself, ‘glided almost imperceptibly’ through both houses of Parliament to Holland’s intense satisfaction. ‘Is it vanity to say,’ he wrote, ‘that when one has succeeded in making such an amendment one feels that one ‌has not lived in vain?’⁷

Meanwhile the central issue of Catholic disabilities remained unresolved. In 1821 a bill for Catholic Emancipation was passed by a small majority in the House of Commons but was thrown out by the Lords. It was the first time that the Commons had voted in favour of such a measure but with the Lords and the king still strongly opposed to it, the prospect of its becoming law seemed as far away as ever. What made matters worse were the false hopes that had been aroused when George IV made a state visit to Ireland earlier that year. He had been received with wild enthusiasm by the populace and by Catholic leaders like Daniel O’Connell, who had knelt down in the surf to offer him a laurel wreath on his departure. It was soon clear that nothing had changed; though in the case of George IV, as Holland recorded in his memoirs, there was more than mere bigotry behind his opposition to Catholic Emancipation:

The Duke of Orléans (Louis Philippe) told me that in the year 1814 or 1815, I forget which, he distinctly avowed his hostility to all concession whatsoever, and explained the nature of his repugnance to it and of his scruples by saying that if catholics could be lawfully admitted to political power they could not lawfully be excluded from the Crown and the title of his family would in that ‌case cease to be legitimate.⁸

Like every monarch since the expulsion of James II, George IV owed his crown to the principle of the Protestant succession. For the Irish, frustrated by years of waiting, such historical quibbles were neither here nor there. Despairing of obtaining justice from the British government, they set about getting it for themselves. A year of famine in 1822, bringing fresh misery to the rural population, was the trigger for concerted action. Political divisions between the different branches of the Catholic movement were put aside and in the summer of 1823, under the leadership of Daniel O’Connell, they united to form the Catholic Association.

To the Irish, Catholic Emancipation meant much more than the right to sit in Parliament and hold high office. (Catholics were still barred from top positions in the law, the civil service and the armed services.) The Catholic Church was part of their national identity and their fidelity to it had been maintained through more than two centuries of oppression. The Catholic Association quickly turned into a mass movement, backed by the Church and funded by a vast number of small subscriptions, the ‘Catholic rent’ as it was called. O’Connell, a lawyer, made certain that the association remained within the law and when two years later the government legislated against Irish associations (on the grounds that they were usurping the role of Parliament) he neatly sidestepped the new restrictions by forming a second Catholic Association. Ostensibly created for the purposes of education and other permitted activities, it in fact carried on the work of the old one.

The year 1823, a turning point in the struggle for Catholic Emancipation, was also a key date for another of Holland House’s cherished causes, the abolition of slavery. In 1806 Fox had died happy in the knowledge that the slave trade was about to be abolished; the hope had been that with the ending of the slave trade the institution of slavery would gradually wither away. By the early 1820s the abolitionists realized that this was not going to happen by itself and in 1823 the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery (later the Anti-Slavery Society) was formed. In May the same year the MP Thomas Fowell Buxton, who had taken over the leadership of the campaign from the ageing William Wilberforce, introduced a motion ‘That the state of slavery is repugnant to the principles of the British and the Christian religion’ and called for its gradual eradication in the British colonies. The motion was accepted in principle by the government, though it was indignantly rejected by the colonial authorities, and it would take another decade before abolition was achieved.

Holland shared Fox’s abhorrence of slavery but his own situation was complicated by the fact that, thanks to Lady Holland’s inheritance from her father, he was himself the owner of large plantations in Jamaica. At the time of her divorce from Webster, Holland had been relieved that Webster had taken over the West Indian properties as part of the settlement, but they had reverted to his wife on Webster’s death. It had been a condition of her inheritance that her husband should add her maiden name of Vassall to his own. Webster had done so on their marriage. In order to establish his claim on the property, Holland was obliged to do the same when Webster died. He changed his family name to Vassall Fox in 1801.

But he was always a reluctant slave owner and his first move on taking over was to refuse to allow the purchase of any more slaves on his estates, the only exception being when two groups of slaves already working there, who had been owned by Webster or his agent, would have otherwise been sold to other masters and torn from their families. For the rest he seems to have been a humane and conscientious employer, issuing orders for extra holidays, forbidding the beating of field workers or any derogatory reference to their servile state, and building churches and schools on his estates. Unlike Jane Austen’s Sir Thomas Bertram he never actually visited his West Indian properties, but he kept in close touch with his agent and others on the spot, among them his friend Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis (author of the gothic bestseller The Monk), a plantation owner who shared his moral scruples about slavery. Their example, they hoped, would help to encourage other planters to improve conditions as a first step towards abolition.

Like many others, Holland had practical reservations about the timing of abolition – too sudden a transition might lead to the bloodshed that had followed the emancipation of the slaves in the French island of Saint-Domingue in 1790 – and the welfare, employment and civil rights of former slaves as well as the degree of compensation required to satisfy the planters needed careful working out. Without being directly involved in their negotiations, Holland played a key role as an intermediary between both sides, though his claims to special knowledge could sometimes irritate his colleagues. ‘I cannot allow,’ complained the Colonial Undersecretary Lord Howick, ‘that we are as ignorant as you seem to suppose of the state ‌of society in the colonies.’⁹

The abolitionists always regarded Holland as an important ally. Among the Holland House papers are letters from many of the leading figures in the movement, including Thomas Clarkson and Zachary Macaulay – the father of the historian – as well as Wilberforce himself. There could hardly be a greater contrast between the two men: Wilberforce driven by his Christian faith, Holland a sceptic, Wilberforce a Tory, who had been Pitt’s greatest friend, Holland the heir to Charles James Fox. But the sympathy between the two was genuine. ‘If it were only the zeal you have always manifested as an abolitionist I should consider you as entitled to my eternal gratitude,’ wrote Wilberforce in 1820,

and if I may without impropriety open my heart to yr Lordship I can truly declare, and strange as it may seem to you considering how much I was opposed to the late Mr Fox in politics, ye case was the same with him also, the simplicity, good nature and frankness I have remarked in you, have impressed me with feelings of regard for you wholly disproportionate to the degree in which I have ‌the pleasure of your acquaintance.¹⁰

Later there would be disagreements between them on the speed of abolition but Wilberforce had no doubt of Holland’s fidelity to his ‘warm-hearted uncle’s’ ideals. ‘I am scarcely more convinced that I myself am an honest abolitionist,’ he told him, ‘than that you are ‌and ever have been such.’¹¹ The bill to abolish slavery was finally passed in 1833 – a few days before the death of Wilberforce. Holland had been more cautious than Wilberforce in his approach, but he had never allowed his interests as an owner to divert him from the central cause. In his chapter on Holland in his Statesmen in the Time of George III, Brougham makes special mention of his ‘extraordinary disinterestedness’:

In the right of Lady Holland, a great Jamaica heiress, he was the owner of extensive plantations cultivated by slave labour; but there was no more strenuous advocate of the abolition both of the slave trade and slavery; and Lady Holland herself, the person most immediately interested in the continuance of these enormous abuses, had too much wisdom and too much virtue ever to interpose the least difference of ‌opinion on this important subject.¹²

Since Brougham, as we know, was no lover of Lady Holland, we can be sure that his tribute was unbiased.