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‌Elder Statesman

THE general election which followed the Reform Bill in December 1832 was an overwhelming victory for the Whigs. ‘I have never seen so many bad hats in my life,’ remarked Wellington as he surveyed the reformed House of Commons. A new age was opening and though Holland would remain Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with one short intermission when the Whigs were out of office, until his death eight years later, he was becoming a faintly anachronistic figure. Like Grey he was a product of the enlightened eighteenth-century aristocracy; like Grey he revered the memory of Fox. His greatest contribution had been to keep the Foxite flame alive through the long years of opposition. With the Whigs now firmly in the saddle, the political role of Holland House had become less important.

Electoral reform had been part of Fox’s agenda, but only in a limited sense and as a counter to the powers of the Crown and the executive. Holland did not take his ideas much further. He believed in an extension of the franchise as a response to the changing demands of society, but it was a franchise based on property with an interest in preserving good order and the country’s institutions. It was right that popular opinion should be respected, but he never subscribed to the idea of universal suffrage and would have been amazed at the developments of the next 90 years. He was 58 in 1832 and for him at least the Reform Bill of that date was a convenient resting place.

If Fox’s aims had been achieved at home there was still much to be done in foreign policy. In welcoming the French Revolution Fox had made himself the patron saint of liberal movements across Europe. From the very first Holland House had been home to political refugees from reactionary regimes, and even if the Russian ambassadress, Princess Lieven, representing the most absolutist power of all, was a frequent visitor, she came there for the company, not the politics. It would have been hard to find much sympathy at Holland House for Russia’s brutal suppression of the Polish national rising in 1831, and when the exiled Polish leader, Prince Czartoryski, came to London in January 1832 he received an enthusiastic welcome from the Hollands despite the Lievens’ protest that he was ‘un criminel d’état’. ‘Lord Palmerston dined two days running with us on purpose to meet him…’ Lady Holland told Henry triumphantly. ‘Esterhazy [the Austrian ambassador] made a point of calling & sitting an hour with him. In short everything that can prove sympathy & deep interest to him ‌personally he has found here.’¹

Holland’s sympathy for the cause of Polish independence had been tempered by the knowledge that Britain had no realistic chance of influencing events there. In Portugal and Spain, however, civil wars between reactionaries and constitutionalists in the early 1830s seemed to offer greater opportunities. Holland, as expected, took the liberal side, though his proposals that Britain should act with France to intervene in both countries were consistently turned down. Palmerston shared none of his Francophilia, or belief in France’s good intentions, and had no desire to become embroiled in foreign adventures in partnership with the French. He deeply distrusted Talleyrand; Grey, by contrast, had now succumbed to the wily diplomat’s charm. Writing to her brother Count Benckendorff in Russia in 1832, Princess Lieven described their varying reactions to the French ambassador. ‘Grey is devoted to him, Palmerston detests him, Lord Holland tells ‌him all the Cabinet secrets.’²

Even though Princess Lieven was exaggerating, Holland’s indiscretions could drive his colleagues to distraction, though, as in the case of Belgium, they often served a useful purpose. His knowledge of foreign affairs and personalities, fed by the constant flow of foreign visitors to Holland House, was immense. (Macaulay, on one of his first visits there, was amazed by the ‘jabber’ of different languages at table.) Though often infuriated by Holland’s meddling, Palmerston respected his judgement and experience, and as a special courtesy to Holland arranged that all Foreign Office despatches should be automatically circulated to him for his perusal. However much they differed over France, Palmerston was always glad to have his views, and Holland’s support for constitutionalist causes in the rest of Europe was largely in tune with his own.

Parallel to Holland’s interest in foreign policy was his concern for Irish affairs, and he was once more in close correspondence with Anglesey, who had returned to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant in December 1830. Catholic Emancipation had averted civil war, but there were still grievances enough to fuel violence and near anarchy.

Religion remained a burning issue, above all where tithes for the Church of Ireland were concerned. It was intolerable that the impoverished Catholic peasantry should be forced to subsidize an alien Church, and under the leadership of O’Connell vast anti-tithe meetings were being held across Ireland. Holland, like Anglesey and the more liberal members of the Cabinet, would have been glad to see concessions introduced at once. But their way was blocked by the House of Lords, and by those, like the Irish Secretary, Edward Stanley, who had religious scruples about the sanctity of the Established Church – and its revenues – in Ireland. Meanwhile behind resistance to paying the tithe lurked the more ominous possibility that the next step would be resistance to paying rent to alien landlords, and that law and order would break down altogether. Throughout the 1830s the Cabinet was torn between policies of coercion and conciliation, and it was on a disagreement over the Irish question that Grey finally resigned in July 1834. He was 70 and had long wanted to retire. Only two months after the Reform Bill was passed he had discussed the possibility of doing so with Holland. ‘[He] spoke feelingly and earnestly on his situation,’ wrote Holland on that occasion,

and, comparing the prospects of his declining years and energies with that of continual and increasing labour and excitement, avowed a disposition if not a determination to retire shortly… I avoided much conversation on it and only urged postponement of all such plans, especially as there was the prospect of a recess for three months to recruit his health and spirits and it was essential to his glory to launch and steer out of port the great vessel ‌of Reform he had constructed.³

Grey had accepted Holland’s urging at the time, but when the moment came he was delighted to retire to a tranquil old age in Northumberland where, according to Creevey, who visited him there, ‘he could not have felt more pleasure from carrying the Reform Bill, than he does apparently when he picks up half a crown at cribbage.’ Holland, who had known Grey in his ups and downs, his indecisions and his moments of greatness, took pride in their long association. A few days before his own death in 1840, Holland wrote some lines in verse; they were found on his dressing table after he died:

Nephew of Fox and friend of Grey,

Enough my meed of fame,

If those who deigned to observe me ‌say,

I injured neither name.⁴

It was a characteristically modest summing up of his political career.

Meanwhile, a new prime minister had to be found. After a brief period of hesitation the king sent for Melbourne, then Home Secretary. ‘Many thought his decision would not have been so absolutely or promptly taken if the queen had been in England [she was visiting her family in Germany],’ wrote Holland, ‘for she misunderstands Lord Melbourne’s paradoxes and humour and, affecting or feeling many religious scruples, ‌thinks his principles too loose.’⁵

Lady Holland was delighted to see another friend of Holland House in power. ‘Her anxiety to see William [Melbourne] you may guess,’ wrote Charles Fox to Henry the next day. ‘I believe she wants to make Papa Foreign Secretary at least. However it will be as much as she can do to persuade him to remain Ch. Duchy Lancaster, as he considered ‌himself yoked to Lord Grey.’⁶

Their sister Lady Lilford, now married and safely out of her mother’s control, wrote to Charles in a similar vein: ‘My Lady and Mary [Charles’s wife],’ she reported, ‘took a drive late in the evening, the latter not at all knowing where she was to go. And who do you suppose they did visit? Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister of three days! They found him extended on an ottoman, sans shirt, sans ‌neckcloth, in a profound slumber.’⁷

Holland stayed on as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in Melbourne’s Cabinet. Lady Holland put a good face on the appointment. ‘Nothing could have induced yr Father to have remained in this mutilated Govt,’ she told Henry, ‘but that it is a legacy of Lord ‌Grey’s & urged by him.’⁸

Melbourne’s first government was short-lived. The king had never really trusted him and when the party leader Althorp was forced to leave the Commons for the Lords following the death of his father Lord Spencer, the king used the excuse of his departure to disband the government. He first turned to Wellington, but the duke, who felt that the government should be led from the Commons, suggested Peel instead. Peel loyally took on the task, but with a minority in the Commons he was in an impossible position and in April 1835, after only five months in power, he resigned and the king was forced to take back Melbourne. Lord John Russell took on the leadership of the House of Commons, and Holland, though increasingly incapacitated by gout, returned to his old post as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. ‘For myself,’ he confided in his journal,

I am only annoyed at having so good a place when I can do nothing for it, and I told Melbourne, Lansdowne and Johnny [Russell] that I was ashamed of accepting the office, though I must own it was so agreable and convenient to me that I could not refuse. It is in truth kind to have me at all and certainly, helpless as I am, it is the seat I can fill with least discredit to myself as well ‌as most profit to myself.⁹

As well as the interest and occupation it provided, Holland’s appointment had practical advantages. The position had a salary of £3,000 a year, an important resource, since the West Indian estates and Ampthill were running at a loss; for some time he had been making up his income by the sale of building land from the Holland House estate. As a member of the government he also had considerable powers of patronage (an accepted fact of political life at the time) and was able to use his influence to further his son Henry’s diplomatic career. In June 1835 Henry was promoted to be minister in Vienna where, since the ambassador (Melbourne’s brother) was ill, he found himself in charge, and where he and his wife – ‘les petits Reynards’ as they were called – soon became a great success. ‘Give [the Viennese] a fiddle to waltz to, a supper to eat and treat them with an indifference approaching insolence, ‌and you will be adored,’¹⁰ he told his mother cynically.

In 1833, after numerous love affairs, Henry had married Lady Mary Augusta Coventry, daughter of the Earl of Coventry. Her parents were separated, and she had been brought up in Rome by her mother, with whom, it appears, Henry had had a mild flirtation some years earlier. The marriage took place in Florence, with none of his family being present, but he brought her to meet them in London shortly afterwards. Vivacious and very small – ‘decidedly under three ‌feet in height’, commented Creevey¹¹ – she quickly won her father-in-law’s heart, and even Lady Holland confessed herself delighted with her ‘little doll’.

A further family pleasure followed when Lady Holland was reunited with her Webster daughter Harriet, after more than 30 years of separation. It was Henry, who had met her some years previously, who brought about the reconciliation. ‘Tell me frankly what you think of her,’ Lady Holland asked him eagerly. ‘Is she pretty, clever, pleasing? In short, what is she? I had a very obliging note expressing much kindness & good affection. I hope her daughter [also called Harriet] is a nice girl and ‌will be satisfactory to her.’¹² The first meeting, which took place at Lady Affleck’s house in the summer of 1834, went off well, and thereafter Harriet and her husband Admiral Fleetwood Pellew became regular visitors to Holland House. It was hard to recognize in the stately figure of their hostess the desperate young woman who had pretended her daughter was dead rather than let her be taken from her.

In February 1835 Lady Affleck died at the age of 88. She had always been on the best of terms with her daughter (apart from refusing to see her while she waited for her divorce) and she left Lady Holland her little ‘nutshell’ of a house in South Street. It was a great economy for the Hollands who no longer had to hire lodgings in London while Parliament was sitting, and as a further bonus it was only a few doors down from Melbourne, who had preferred to stay in his own house rather than move to 10 Downing Street. He would drop in there on his way home as easily as he did at Holland House.

Like Lord John Russell, now the Leader of the Commons, Melbourne had always been part of the Hollands’ inner circle. Holland never had the reverence for him that he had for Grey, but his respect for him increased as he watched him grow into his role as prime minister, acting with a decisiveness and grasp of essentials that his indolent manner would not have led one to imagine him capable of. Even at his busiest, however, Melbourne always had time to relax at Holland House, where he could be found browsing in the library, discussing the early fathers of the Church with Allen or sitting with his feet on one of Lady Holland’s drawing-room chairs, his laughter always the loudest in the room. The Hollands had stood by him faithfully through all the dramas of his marriage with Caroline Lamb. They would do so again the following year when he was involved in a new scandal, this time in an action brought against him for adultery by the husband of Sheridan’s granddaughter, the beautiful Mrs Norton.

Caroline Norton’s relationship with Sheridan had been the first link in her friendship with Melbourne, who had known the playwright well in his last years and even contemplated writing his life. In 1830, when the Whigs came to power, she had written to Melbourne, reminding him of his old acquaintance with her grandfather and asking him to find a job for her husband. Melbourne obliged with a place as a police magistrate for Norton, at the same time embarking on a romantic, but probably platonic, friendship with his wife. In 1836, a scandal blew up when Norton (urged on, it was thought, by the prime minister’s political opponents) sued Mrs Norton for divorce, naming Melbourne as the co-respondent. Not everyone believed Melbourne’s denial of misconduct with Mrs Norton – ‘forse era ‌ver ma non però credibile,’¹³ noted Holland – but the flimsiness of the evidence, and the meanness and spite which had motivated Norton’s action, so disgusted the jury that Melbourne was acquitted.

It was generally agreed that Norton was a brute. But Mrs Norton was a highly colourful character, too witty and free-spoken to please conventional opinion, and though she had been found innocent her reputation was inevitably tarnished by her trial. It never affected her welcome at Holland House; the Hollands had their own morality and loyalty to old friends was one of them. As for Melbourne, who had been more harassed by the affair than he cared to admit, the trial proved a blessing in disguise. ‘The whole Publick as well as the political adherents of Lord Melbourne sincerely rejoiced at the favorable verdict,’ wrote Holland,

and the more respectable of the Tories, especially the Duke of Wellington himself, discountenanced every attempt to affix any imputation on the private character either of Lord Melbourne or the Lady… The incident from which the vulgar of the tories hoped and the liberals at home had apprehended much, turned out so well that it rather endeared Lord Melbourne to the popular party ‌than estranged him from them.¹⁴

Even William IV, who much preferred the Tories to the Whigs, refused to make capital out of Melbourne’s difficulties. As the affectionate father of ten illegitimate children he was in no position to throw stones. Writing to Lady Holland a few days before the case was quashed, Melbourne’s nephew William Cowper told her: ‘There is a story going about that the King, when told that Lord Melbourne would not [after an unfavourable verdict] be fit to be his minister, replied, “Then I am ‌not fit to be King.”’¹⁵