By the Same Author
The Marvellous Boy:
The Life and Myth of Thomas Chatterton
The Young Romantics: Writers & Liaisons, Paris, 1827–37
The Kemble Era: John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons and the London Stage
Women of the French Revolution
Juniper Hall: An English Refuge
from the French Revolution
Richard Brinsley Sheridan: A Life
Susanna, the Captain and the Castrato:
Scenes from the Burney Salon, 1779–80
Ireland’s Minstrel: A Life of Tom Moore
Anthologies: as editor
Feasts (with Christopher Bland)
Proposals (with Laurence Kelly)
Animals and Us (with John Train)
As Editor
Alyson: A Painter’s Journey
Published in 2013 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
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Distributed in the United States and Canada
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Copyright © 2013 Linda Kelly
The right of Linda Kelly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978 1 78076 449 8
eISBN: 978 0 85773 296 5
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress catalog card: available
Text design, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London
Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- 1 ∙ Nephew of Fox
- 2 ∙ Lovers’ Meeting
- 3 ∙ In Opposition
- 4 ∙ Foreign Adventures
- 5 ∙ ‘The Best and Greatest Man…’
- 6 ∙ Edinburgh Reviewers
- 7 ∙ Spanish Journeys
- 8 ∙ Enter Byron
- 9 ∙ Towards Waterloo
- 10 ∙ Defenders of Napoleon
- 11 ∙ At Home at Holland House
- 12 ∙ The Trial of Queen Caroline
- 13 ∙ ‘A House of All Europe’
- 14 ∙ Reforming Campaigns
- 15 ∙ Family Matters
- 16 ∙ A Surrogate Son
- 17 ∙ Party Confusions
- 18 ∙ Irish Affairs
- 19 ∙ The July Revolution
- 20 ∙ The Whigs in Power
- 21 ∙ ‘The Bill, the Whole Bill and Nothing but the Bill’
- 22 ∙ The Triumph of Reform
- 23 ∙ Elder Statesman
- 24 ∙ ‘This Wretched Day’
- 25 ∙ Leaving the Stage
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Plates
List of Illustrations
Frontispiece: Vignette of Holland House, from Holland House by Princess Liechtenstein.
1. Lord Holland in Florence, by François-Xavier Fabre, 1795. Private Collection.
2. Lady Webster (later Lady Holland) by Sir Robert Fagan, 1793. Private Collection.
3. Lady Webster (later Lady Holland) as a Virgin of the Sun by George Romney, 1796. Private Collection.
4. Charles James Fox by Karl Anton Hickel, 1794. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
5. Dr John Allen, librarian at Holland House, by Sir Edwin Landseer, 1830. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
6. ‘Introduction of Citizen Volpone and his suite at Paris’, mezzotint by James Gillray, 1802.
7. The Reverend Sydney Smith by Henry Perronet Briggs, 1830. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
8. Lady Caroline Lamb in page’s costume by Thomas Phillips, c.1813. Courtesy of the Bridgeman Picture Library.
9. Lord Byron, engraving by Harlow of the portrait by Henry Hoppner Meyer, 1816.
10. Madame de Staël, after a portrait by Gérard, 1812.
11. ‘Sketch for a Prime Minister’, The Satirist, 1 February, 1811, attributed to Samuel de Wilde.
12. The Dutch garden at Holland House, from Holland House by Princess Liechtenstein.
13. Sketch of Samuel Rogers by Sir Edwin Landseer, c.1835. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
14. Lord Holland by Sir George Hayter, 1820. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
15. ‘A tête à tête’, Lord Holland and Talleyrand. Cartoon by HB (John Doyle), 1831.
16. Lord John Russell introduces the Reform Bill in the House of Commons, 1 March, 1831.
17. The passing of the Reform Bill in the House of Lords, 7 June, 1832.
18. Lord Grey of the Reform Bill, after Sir Thomas Lawrence.
19. Sketch of William Lamb, later Lord Melbourne, by his wife Lady Caroline Lamb, c.1814.
20. The library at Holland House by C.R. Leslie, 1838. Private Collection.
21. The library at Holland House after the air raid, 28 September 1940. Courtesy of British Heritage.
To our grandchildren:
Edward, Sasha, George, Nadya, Tara, Katherine, Dyala, Charlotte and Arthur
Preface
ONE of the last great balls in London in the summer of 1939 took place at Holland House. George VI and Queen Elizabeth were among the guests, and the queue of cars to the gates on Kensington High Street stretched back to Hyde Park Corner. It was a magnificent finale. War was looming and a few weeks later the then owner, the sixth Earl of Ilchester, removed the most valuable paintings, books and furniture, as well as the priceless collection of family manuscripts, to his country home at Melbury in Dorset. We can only be thankful for his foresight. On 27 September 1940 Holland House was largely destroyed by enemy bombs.
Lord Ilchester wrote two books based on family papers about the history of Holland House, The Home of the Hollands, 1605–1820 and Chronicles of Holland House, 1820–1900. He also edited the journals and Spanish journals of Elizabeth, Lady Holland, her letters to her son, Henry Edward Fox, and Henry Fox’s own journals as a young man, each in their way reflecting the excitement of the years when Holland House was the centre of Whig politics. A devoted guardian of the family archive, Ilchester was determined that the vast collection of Holland House papers, with their far-reaching coverage of political and family history, should not leave Britain, and after his death in 1959 they were acquired, as he had wished, by the British Library. The Holland House paintings, books and furniture – together with busts of Fox and others which were rescued from the fire – are still at Melbury and I am enormously grateful to Charlotte Townshend, granddaughter of the seventh Earl of Ilchester, for her kindness in showing them to me. They brought the third Lord Holland’s circle to life in a way that nothing else could have done.
I am very grateful, too, to the staff of the British Library, the Kensington Central Library, the London Library, the National Portrait Gallery and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland; to Francis Russell for making my visit to Melbury possible and for sharing his knowledge of its treasures; to Theodore Wilson Harris for allowing me to quote from his novel Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness, and to Tim Cribb for introducing me to it; to Peter Cochran for allowing me to quote from his transcription of Hobhouse’s comments in Doris Langley Moore’s copy of Moore’s Life of Byron, now in the collection of Jack Wasserman; to my agent and former publisher, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson; to my editors Lester Crook, Joanna Godfrey and Nadine El-Hadi at I.B.Tauris, and Alex Billington and Alex Middleton at Tetragon; to friends and relations for their help and encouragement: Henry Anglesey, Marina Camrose, Raymond Carr, Rosanna and Anthony Gardner, Mark Girouard, Rachel Grigg, Erskine Guinness, Nicholas Kelly, Anthony Malcolmson, Chip Martin, Douglas Matthews, Mollie and John Julius Norwich, Valerie Pakenham, Antonia Pinter, Mehreen Saigol, the late Christine Sutherland, Hugh Thomas, John Train, Katharine Wakefield and Frances Wilson; and last but certainly not least to my husband Laurence Kelly for his constant interest and support.