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‌The July Revolution

PARLIAMENT was due to open on 5 February. The king’s speech would spell out what concessions, if any, would be made to the Catholics. Without revealing his hand in public, Wellington had already determined on full emancipation. Behind the scenes there were frenzied last-minute negotiations as his ministers, even those who had previously opposed the measure, did their best to persuade the king to agree. No one has been able to explain his resistance satisfactorily. He had been sympathetic to the Catholics as Prince of Wales, and the principle of Protestant supremacy had already been breached by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Perhaps he was driven by his loathing of the Whigs, perhaps he was merely too ill to cope with the idea of change. But finally, tearfully, resentfully, he had been forced to give in.

The king’s speech was a grudging affair. It was agreed that the laws imposing civil disabilities for Catholics should be reviewed (a coded acceptance of Catholic Emancipation) but the measure would not be retrospective – to take his seat, O’Connell must stand for re-election – and the property qualification for voting would be raised from 40 shillings to £10 a year. Nonetheless the great point had been made. On 5 April 1829, after further obstructions from the king, who discovered new scruples about his coronation oath, the bill for Catholic Emancipation received the royal assent.

‘Remember your Papa was the first man who moved C. Emancipation in the House of Lords when he was very young. It is ‌a proud thing for him,’¹ Lady Holland wrote to Henry. It was indeed a proud moment for Holland, and for all those who had struggled for Catholic Emancipation so long. Writing to Henry while the bill was going through the Lords, Holland gave special praise to Anglesey who, as soon as the measure was announced, had flung himself wholeheartedly behind the government:

To his wise, firm, good tempered and impartial administration, the Government and Empire owe the power of passing the measure as a boon and not as an article of capitulation… He comes home, full of just resentment and anxious to vindicate himself from the aspersions of having committed a breach of duty. But he finds the measure he had recommended, and for the promotion of which he was censured, and to all appearances punished, openly patronized by the government. He immediately suppresses his personal grievances [and] supports the measure with all his might and main… If this be not magnanimity and patriotism I know not ‌the meaning of the words.²

Holland’s tribute was well deserved. But the so-called boon, which might have won the hearts of the Irish a few years earlier, had come too late. They knew it had been offered under duress and they saw no reason to be grateful. For O’Connell and his followers Catholic Emancipation was merely a step on the road to Irish independence, and the bill had hardly been passed before they began campaigning for the repeal of the Act of Union. Far from ending discontent in Ireland, the reform would lead to a new round of demands.

Meanwhile the bill had split the Tory party. The Ultra-Tories were outraged. ‘No popery’ had been the slogan which united them and the vast majority of their fellow countrymen; they felt that the Church and constitution had been betrayed. Perhaps only a prime minister with the prestige and authority of Wellington could have seen the measure through, but it left his government much weakened, cut off from the Ultras on one side and the liberal, or Canningite, Tories on the other. The Whigs refrained from formal opposition; still divided among themselves, they were waiting to see what happened next.

Few of the intimates of Holland House had been more delighted by the news of Catholic Emancipation than Byron’s friend Tom Moore. A Catholic himself, he had sung his country’s sorrows unforgettably in his Irish Melodies and used his witty pen in a series of sparkling satires on the king and the Tory government. Even the king had been amused. ‘Don’t you remember Tom Moore’s description of me at breakfast?’ he once asked Walter Scott,

The table spread with tea and toast,

Death ‌warrants and the Morning Post.³

Having recently published a two-volume biography of his fellow Irishman Richard Brinsley Sheridan – ‘this will be a dull book, your Sheridan,’ Lady Holland had forecast crushingly – Moore was now completing his researches for his life of Byron. Throughout the summer of 1829 he was a frequent visitor to Holland House – ‘A good deal of talk about Byron’ was a constant refrain in his diary – and his entries include some amusing glimpses of his hosts: ‘To Holland House,’ he writes on 14 June,

where I copied out the passages of The Devil’s Drive [an unfinished poem by Byron]… Found Rogers and Luttrell there; and all walked out in the grounds with Lady H. who set off in her whiskey with Lord Ashburnham, while we remained with Lord Holland stock still on horseback and flattering ‌himself he was taking exercise.⁴

‘To Holland House’, he writes again on 23 September. ‘As I was about to take my place next to Lord Holland at dinner, my Lady said, “No, come up here” ordering me into another seat. “So you have taken Moore from me”, said Lord Holland with the air ‌of a disappointed school boy.’⁵

On 1 January 1830 the first volume of Moore’s Life of Byron appeared amidst a storm of controversy. Its references to Lady Byron were few and respectful but they did suggest that the outcry against Byron at the time of their separation had been largely undeserved. Lady Byron reacted furiously by privately printing a pamphlet, ‘Remarks on Mr Moore’s Life of Lord Byron’. Ostensibly a defence of her parents, whom Byron had criticized in letters quoted by Moore, it was in fact a work of self-justification, in which she hinted darkly at secrets too awful to be disclosed. She invoked the help of Holland, asking him to pass on a copy to Moore as if it had come directly from him. Holland declined politely; he would send Moore a copy if she wished, he told her, but he would not conceal that he had done so at her request. Moore, in his view, had dealt with the subject of the separation as kindly and discreetly as was compatible with justice to his friend; nor could it be denied that Byron’s opinion of her parents had been as stated in his letters. He begged her, for her own sake, not to stir up further publicity by circulating the pamphlet. ‘Lady Byron is getting into a silly controversy with Moore over some passages in his book,’ Lady Holland told Henry. ‘She will be the loser as many suppressed passages will now be disclosed, & she will not like it. Your Papa is doing his utmost to quell her restlessness but in vain. I am afraid she is a cold, obstinate woman, but ‌do not mention this opinion.’⁶

Lady Byron, in fact, seemed bent on self-destruction, sending out so many copies of her pamphlet that they soon found their way into the bookshops, and inspired a wealth of prurient speculation in the papers. Wisely refusing to be drawn into an argument, Moore simply published the pamphlet as an appendix to his second volume, thus effectively taking the wind from her sails. He had dealt with the marriage as truthfully as he could in the prudish climate of the time; the facts have been raked over by biographers ever since.

Holland, who had listened to Lady Byron’s confidences when she was contemplating divorce, had drawn his own conclusions about the reasons for the separation. They are revealed to us by Hobhouse in one of his marginal notes – some indignant, some reluctantly approving – in his copy of Moore’s biography. Moore had suggested that Lady Byron might have overreacted by taking ‘some hinted confession of undefined horrors’ by her husband as sober truth. ‘Something of the sort certainly,’ agreed Hobhouse, ‘unless, as Lord Holland told me, ‌he tried to b—— her.’⁷

On 26 June 1830 George IV died, having reigned as regent and king for 19 years. In his resistance to Catholic Emancipation he had epitomized all the Hollands hated about the monarchy, but he had been the friend and admirer of Fox, and they both had kindly memories of his younger days. Lady Holland had failed to be received at court – the ban on divorcees was inexorable – ‘yet personally,’ as she told Henry not long before his death, ‘I have good will to him, partly from old acquaintance & partly from believing there is more good in him than falls to the lot of most Princes: and had he not been one, he would, I am persuaded, have ‌been a most amiable person.’⁸

The new king, William IV, as we know, was the father-in-law of the Hollands’ son Charles, and the two families were on the best of terms. William IV loved having his children by Mrs Jordan around him – his wife, Queen Adelaide, was childless – and immediately appointed Charles, then serving in Halifax, as equerry to the queen. Holland, who was bidden to an audience at St James’s Palace a week after George IV’s death, was able to thank him in person. The king, he reported, had decided never to dine at private houses in London: ‘There would be no end to it.’ Perhaps he would make an exception in the case of the Duke of Wellington’s Waterloo dinner. Holland House, however, was not in London, ‌‘and there he should dine’.⁹

He did so for the first time as king on 30 July, when the guests included the Duke of Sussex (the king’s brother), the Duke of Argyll, Nelson’s friend Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy, the Granvilles, Melbourne, Luttrell, Lady Affleck and Miss Fox. Their names were entered in the dinner book as usual by Dr Allen, but, unusually, there was a footnote on the page: ‘News arrived of the flight of the King of France ‌to Compiègne. This news premature.’¹⁰

It must have been a dramatic interruption to the dinner party, and perhaps the Hollands’ first intimation of the success of the July Revolution. Charles X’s appointment of the arch-reactionary Prince de Polignac as his chief minister the previous summer had removed the last chance to come to terms with liberal opinion. On 25 July he issued the fatal ordinances that brought about his downfall, dissolving Parliament, reducing the franchise, above all suspending the freedom of the press. The last clause sparked revolution. On 26 July a group of journalists, led by Adolphe Thiers, issued a manifesto, denouncing the ordinances as unconstitutional and calling on France to resist. On the 27th, the presses of the opposition papers, published in defiance of the ordinances, were destroyed by the police. Angry crowds spilt onto the Paris streets; that evening, as garrison troops moved into position on the boulevards, the barricades began to go up. By 29 July, after three days of bitter street fighting, Paris was in the hands of the insurgents. The tricolour floated above the Tuileries, and the aged Talleyrand, watching the rout of the royalist troops from his window, turned to dictate a note to his secretary: ‘On the 29th of July, at precisely five minutes past twelve, the elder branch of the Bourbon family ‌ceased to reign over France.’¹¹

But what of the younger branch? It was Charles X’s cousin, the Duke of Orléans, to whom the deputies, alarmed by the popular fury and seeking to contain it, now turned. Son of Philippe Égalité, a soldier in the revolutionary army at the Battle of Jemappes, he had all the right credentials for a liberal monarch. On 30 July, flanked by Lafayette, and holding a tricolour in one hand, Louis Philippe was proclaimed ‘Roi des Français’ on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville. The crowd, persuaded by the tricolour, dispersed. The three days of revolution, ‘Les Trois Glorieuses’, were over.

The Hollands were ecstatic at the news: ‘We all foresaw that the ordonnances would be the ruin of the Ministry and the dynasty,’ Holland told Henry,

and for more than fifteen years many, and I among them have foreboded that the French revolutions would end sooner or later in their natural euthanasia – a constitutional king of the House of Orléans. But who could have imagined that all would have been effected, and so heroically and happily effected, in three short days? And that the forbearance, magnanimity and wisdom of the people after victory should have been as great, glorious and perfect as the heroism during the contest. ‌It makes one young again.¹²

It was only 14 months since Louis Philippe had dined at Holland House on a visit to England with his son, and his friendship with the Hollands went back many years. Holland had seriously considered going over to Paris immediately to congratulate the new king – he would have done son so ‘con amore’, he told Brougham. Gout and etiquette forbade it, but he was gratified to receive a copy of the king’s acceptance speech, and later a letter in the king’s own hand – in impeccable English – thanking him for his good wishes:

I am very thankful for Lady Holland’s kind messages & for your very flattering expressions on the subject of the part I have acted in the new situation to which I have been called so suddenly. The task that has fallen to my lot is a laborious one & it is difficult after so great a convulsion to subdue the irritation & to re-establish public confidence. I am striving incessantly to maintain the peace within and the peace without. War, bad as it is at all times, would be in the present state of Nations, attended with miseries & misfortunes ‌unparalleled in any former wars.¹³

Louis Philippe had come to power at a dangerous moment. The Holy Alliance – Russia, Austria and Prussia – had been formed to prevent the contagion of revolution spreading. It had only been the prompt recognition of the new regime by Wellington that dissuaded the other great powers from going to war to restore the Bourbon monarchy. But the French example inspired liberal and nationalist uprisings in other European countries. A revolution by the Belgians, demanding freedom from Dutch rule, broke out in Brussels a month later; it was followed that autumn by risings in Poland, Italy and Germany. The rebellions in the last three countries were ruthlessly suppressed. Only the Belgians succeeded in obtaining their independence, with the creation of Belgium as a separate state in December 1830 and its establishment as a constitutional monarchy under Leopold of Saxe-Coburg the following summer. The fact that this took place peacefully was largely thanks to Louis Philippe, to his ambassador in London, Talleyrand, and in a small but significant way to the influence of Holland House.