ON 21 March 1831, Lady Holland reached the age of 60. Harking back to the days of their courtship, Holland concluded his birthday tribute on a touching note:
I loved you much at twenty-four
By now both the Hollands were semi-invalids, Holland largely confined to a wheelchair. He bore his sufferings with good humour, referring to himself jokingly as Lord Chalkstones (the chalky deposits formed by gout). Often, when his health was too bad to leave home the Cabinet would meet at Holland House (Lady Holland dining with her sister-in-law on these occasions) or in the London house they rented during parliamentary sessions.
Lady Holland took her aches and pains more seriously and kept a string of doctors – her ‘host of leeches’ as Holland called them – at her command. ‘Malade et mourant lui semblent synonymes,’2 a French friend once remarked. But she had lost none of her zest for entertaining, and with her husband now in the government the influence of Holland House was more powerful than ever. At a time when thrones were tottering elsewhere, Lady Holland, in the words of Lady Granville, was ‘the only really undisputed monarchy in Europe’.3
It is interesting to see her at this period through the eyes of a new visitor, the young Thomas Babington Macaulay, already well known as a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and a brilliant speaker in the debates on parliamentary reform. In May 1831 he was talking to Sir James Macdonald at a reception at Lansdowne House when he heard a voice behind him say, ‘Sir James, introduce me to Mr Macaulay,’ and, turning, ‘beheld a large, bold-looking woman, with the remains of a fine person and the air of Queen Elizabeth.’4 The introduction was followed by an invitation to dine at Holland House a few days later.
Macaulay was a rising man, but a visit to Holland House was an event. ‘Well my dear,’ he announced to his sister the day after, ‘I have dined at Holland House.’ The house, he wrote was delightful, ‘the perfection of the old Elizabethan style’, Lord Holland ‘all kindness, simplicity and vivacity’, and Lady Holland ‘excessively gracious’ to her new guest. But there was a haughtiness in her courtesy, he wrote, which, despite all he had heard about her, surprised him:
The centurion did not keep his soldiers in better order than she kept her guests. It is to one, ‘Go’ and he goeth, and to another ‘do this’ and it is done. ‘Ring the bell Mr Macaulay’. ‘Lay down that screen Lord Russell; you will spoil it’; ‘Mr Allen, take a candle and show Mr Cradock the picture of Bonaparte.’5
The first invitation quickly led to others and Macaulay was soon a familiar figure at Holland House, where the breadth of his knowledge and the brilliance of his conversation amazed his hearers. Once embarked on a topic, his flow of eloquence was almost unstoppable; ‘he has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation perfectly delightful,’ remarked Sydney Smith. Lady Holland would call him to order with an imperious tapping of her fan: ‘Now Macaulay, we have had enough of this; give us something else.’6
Macaulay, it was said, would talk to a fence post if no other audience was available, but this did not prevent him from being a shrewd observer of those around him and in his letters to his sister he gives us vivid sketches of his hosts.
With Holland, ‘very lively; very intellectual; well read in politics and in the lighter literature both of ancient and modern times’, he felt an immediate affinity:
He sets me more at my ease than almost any person that I know, by a certain good-humoured way of contradicting that he has. He always begins by drawing down his shaggy eyebrows, making a face extremely like his uncle [Fox], wagging his head and saying: ‘Now do you know, Mr M, I do not quite see that. How do you make it out?’
Lady Holland, he thought, was a woman of ‘considerable talents and great literary acquirements’ – high praise from so erudite a critic as Macaulay. But though she was gracious to him personally, he was dismayed by her manner to others, particularly to Allen:
He really is treated like a negro slave. ‘Mr Allen, go into the drawing room and bring me my reticule.’ ‘Mr Allen, go and see what can be the matter that they do not bring up dinner.’ ‘Mr Allen, there is not enough turtle soup for you. You must take gravy soup or none.’
‘Yet I can scarcely pity the man,’ he added. ‘He has an independent income [as warden of Dulwich College] and if he can stoop to be ordered about like a footman, I cannot so much blame her for the contempt in which she treats him.’7
The relationship between Allen and the Hollands was a complex one. Holland habitually consulted him on political matters and he was much respected by Holland’s colleagues in the Cabinet, particularly Grey. Despite her high-handed behaviour, Lady Holland relied on him totally in the practical affairs of life and the dependence between them seems to have been mutual. He had his own rooms at Holland House, and was so much part of life there that his study was known as Allen’s Room by each succeeding generation. ‘You are yourself like health,’ Holland once told him. ‘Once never feels your value more than when you are absent.’8
Soon after Macaulay’s first visit to Holland House Sydney Smith arrived from his rectory in Yorkshire for an extended stay. Thanks to Whig patronage he was at last about to receive advancement in the Church. From September that year he would become resident Canon of St Paul’s – a promotion all the sweeter since it brought him into easy range of Holland House. ‘Some of the best and happiest days of my life I have spent under your roof,’ he once told Lady Holland, ‘and though there may be in some houses, particularly those of our eminent clerics, a stronger disposition to pious exercises… I do not believe all Europe can produce as much knowledge, wit and worth as passes in and out of your door under the nose of Thomas the porter.’9
Macaulay knew Smith already and had visited him in the country; it was he who first christened him ‘the Smith of Smiths’. At Holland House he got the full flavour of Smith in company. His sense of fun, Macaulay wrote, was inexhaustible, and unlike Samuel Rogers, whose wit was carefully prepared, Smith always spoke from the impulse of the moment. Rogers would usually fall silent when Smith was talking; he preferred it when the company divided and he could have a smaller audience to himself. Neither, however, was a match for Macaulay. ‘Now Macaulay,’ said Smith after one of his long monologues, ‘when I am gone you will be sorry you have never heard me speak.’10
There would always be laughter and good company at Holland House, but the atmosphere that summer was heightened by the dramas surrounding the Reform Bill. In the House of Commons, the battle to get it through the committee stage was being waged with increasing bitterness. The Tories, determined on a policy of obstruction, used every delaying tactic they could find, fighting it line by line against a background of growing anger in the country. ‘The bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the bill’ was the cry; the fear of revolution should it not go through was very real.
The government resisted all attempts to modify the bill, making it clear that the House would sit till Christmas, or the following Christmas if necessary, till it went through. The date of the usual summer recess slipped by; for three sweltering months in the hot and crowded conditions of the lower chamber, the debate raged back and forth. Finally on the morning of 22 September the bill was passed on its third reading and was presented to the House of Lords that same day. ‘There seemed a preconcerted silence and moderation on the opposition benches,’ wrote Holland in his journal, ‘and they received the distant day of Monday 2nd Octr, named for the second reading, and even the hint that little time would be allowed between that stage and the committal, with great composure.’11
It was plain that this was just the calm before the storm. The government knew there was bound to be a majority against them in the Lords and had already discussed the idea of creating additional peers to carry the bill through. But Grey was reluctant to bring things to a crisis, and it was unlikely that the king would agree to do so. On 3 October, when Grey rose to move the second reading of the bill, he relied on his own eloquence, and the danger of the consequences should it be rejected, to make his case. His speech, delivered with a fire that recalled the great days of Burke and Fox, was the start of a five-day debate, which lasted till the small hours of each morning. The high spot was a speech by Brougham, who reached the climax of his peroration by falling on his knees as he pleaded with the house, ‘I warn you, I implore you, yea on my knees I supplicate you – Reject not this Bill.’12 He had drunk at least a bottle and a half of mulled port during his speech, noted Holland, and had some difficulty in getting up again.
Holland had attended the whole debate, though he did not speak, and he stood with Grey in a little group as they awaited the result of the division. Holland, wrote a spectator, ‘was a little excited, but Grey was tranquil and smiling, as if they had been dividing on a road bill… No stranger would have imagined that a measure was decided that might occasion the land to be deluged in blood.’13
The bill was thrown out by 41 votes, their numbers including 21 peers who were proprietors of nomination boroughs. ‘May not a man do what he likes with his own?’ the Duke of Newcastle had demanded, when his right to nominate his own MP was questioned, and the feeling that nomination seats were private property, about to be seized without compensation, accounted for the resistance of some borough owners. The Church too feared a diminution of its privileges and the bishops voted 20 to two against the bill. Their votes, with those of the borough owners, noted Holland, ‘made up the number… by which we were beat.’14
The defeat of the bill was greeted with a wave of fury. There were riots all over the country; mobs broke the Duke of Wellington’s windows at Apsley House and razed the Duke of Newcastle’s house in Nottingham to the ground; bishops were burnt in effigy; Tory peers and clergy went in fear of their lives. Till then there had been few mass protests; the one exception, a peaceful demonstration by starving agricultural labourers the previous autumn, had been ruthlessly dealt with by Melbourne as Home Secretary. Three men were executed, another 457 transported, in an assize that stained the government’s reputation and cast a new light on the supposedly genial Melbourne’s character. But there were no troops in the country sufficient to deal with a general uprising. In the Commons debate, which followed the bill’s rejection in the Lords, Macaulay summed the contradictions of the situation:
I know only two ways by which societies can permanently be governed – by public opinion or by the sword… I understand how the peace is kept in New York. It is governed by the assent and support of the people. I understand also how the peace is kept at Milan. It is by the bayonets of the Austrian soldiers. But how the peace is to be kept in England by a government acting on the principles of the present opposition, I do not understand.15
The Reform Bill had become far more than a party measure. Even those who aspired to a far wider suffrage rested their hopes on it as a first step, and radicals and working-class associations were as ardent in its support as the middle classes it would chiefly benefit. At the other side of the spectrum was the king, whose fears that the bill was too democratic could only be calmed by the tact and patience of his aristocratic ministers. Ironically, perhaps, it was only an aristocratic ministry that could have channelled such varying demands through Parliament and presided successfully over the loss of its monopoly of power. In 1831, however, this happy outcome was still far from certain and the first question to be decided was whether the government would leave office after being defeated in the Lords.
Lady Holland was appalled at the prospect. ‘Mama’s agony at the idea of going out was monstrously diverting, if it were not one’s mother,’ reported Charles Fox to his brother.
‘Your Papa is what I feel about… now really I cannot say how much it vexes me to think of him.’ I said, ‘Why I do not think in two days, if you would let him go to H.H., he would even think of it; you would, I know, be sorry.’
‘Ha ah, you are quite wrong. If you knew of the little things, the sort of old recollections that all come back to him, the little feeling of doing good, of moderating some people, of softening prejudices, foreign politicks, the great hobby of his Uncle, of France and England, and still more his own.’
I interrupted and most impudently (I don’t mean to her impudent and Allen was only present!) said, ‘Oh you mean Mama, that he and old Talleyrand are to keep the peace of Europe, don’t you?’
My Lady looked angry, and of course was quick enough to say immediately, ‘Oh, you may hold your Father cheap, &c., &c.’ However, my shot told, which was all I wanted.16
Fortunately for Lady Holland’s peace of mind the question was quickly decided. At the insistence of the king Grey agreed to stay on in office, but only on condition that the king support a new version of the bill, unchanged in its main outlines, though possibly including some minor alterations. This would be presented at the beginning of the next session, normally due to open in February, but brought forward to early December in view of the urgency of the situation. Riots in Bristol, during which the mob took control for three days and burned down the prison and other public buildings, showed how fragile law and order had become. Meanwhile the growth of pro-reform unions, theoretically committed to peaceful protest but threatening from the sheer weight of their membership, made matters still more pressing. The brief period before Parliament reassembled on 6 December was a time of multiple negotiations – with the leaders of the unions, which were tolerated but forbidden to carry arms; with the ‘waverers’, or undecided peers; with the king; with differing shades of opinion in the Cabinet itself. Holland’s journal for this period is full of fascinating sidelights: the queen cutting Grey at a court reception; Durham, the most left-wing of the bill’s promoters – he was commonly known as Radical Jack – in a fury with his father-in-law Grey, because he had not been given an earldom; Wellington stirring up doubts among the waverers, and alarming the king with his forecasts of disaster: ‘He’s so d—d cunning,’ said Melbourne’s brother Frederick Lamb. ‘People don’t know him; he’s the cunningest fellow in the world.’17
The Tories in the Commons were in a chastened mood when Parliament reopened and the second reading of the bill of 17 December was carried by a majority of two to one, many Tories deliberately abstaining. But would it be possible to get it through the House of Lords without the creation of new peers, and if not, would the king agree to make them? This was the controversy still to be resolved when the House adjourned for Christmas the next day.