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‌‘This Wretched Day’

ON 20 June 1837, William IV died, after reigning for just seven years. Holland, as we know, had pursued a lifelong policy of opposition to the Crown while Allen, his closest political confidant, was an outright republican. But he was sincerely moved at the news of the king’s death. For all the ramblings and eccentricities which had earned him the nickname of Silly Billy, William IV had proved to be an exemplary king whose decency, common sense and determination to do his duty as he saw it had carried the monarchy safely into the mid nineteenth century. ‘He was on the whole,’ wrote Holland, ‘the best king of his race and perhaps of any race we have ever had, and the one who has left the greatest name as a Constitutional Sovereign and the first Magistrate of a free and improving nation.’

Holland’s son Charles and his wife Mary, together with the queen and all his other children, had been constantly at the king’s bedside; the king died holding Mary’s hand. From them and others Holland received first-hand descriptions of his final days. One incident, recorded in his diary, struck him particularly:

Early in the morning of Sunday, 18th. June he [the king] was thought by Lady Mary, Sir Herbert Taylor and the queen, who were present, to have said, ‘I hope I may live to see the sunset of this horrible day’; the last word but one was very indistinct nor could they divine his reason for terming the day horrible as he expressed no other impatience and his sufferings did not appear aggravated… In relating the circumstance to Lord Munster [the king’s eldest son] he quickly remarked that the word he intended to use was ‘Memorable’ for the day was the Anniversary of the Victory of Waterloo. Accordingly, before the sun set or the poor king expired, which was not till 2 AM of the 20th, the usual flag presented by the Duke of Wellington arrived and Lord Munster, with attentive and affectionate presence of mind, hastened into the room and laid it at the feet or across the knees of the expiring king who still had strength enough of mind to raise his hand and touch it and to ‌murmur, tho’ inarticulately, ‘Glorious, Glorious.’¹

It is one of those vignettes that light up Holland’s journal of his years in office, giving it an immediacy often lacking in his formal memoirs. Never intended for publication, he wrote it, he explained, with the idea of providing material for himself or subsequent historians, and had kept it most faithfully during the momentous period when the Reform Bill was being debated. Since then he had written it intermittently and had laid it aside altogether during the few months when the Whigs were out of office. ‘I am no longer behind the scenes,’ he had written, ‘and neither listen nor prompt. I ‌may therefore close my book.’² He had taken up his pen again when Melbourne returned to power.

Shortly before he died, William IV sent a secret message to Victoria (bypassing her interfering mother the Duchess of Kent) advising her, if possible, to continue with the existing ministry. In the election that followed his death, the Whigs had held the majority, and the queen had accordingly taken his advice. She was a warm supporter of the government’s liberal politics at home and abroad, noted Holland, and had a strong predilection for her uncle Leopold, whose recent elevation to the Belgian throne, she seemed to think, identified her family’s interests with a constitutional monarchy. ‘This is lucky for the interests of freedom,’ wrote Holland,

though perhaps it is rather mortifying to philosophy to perceive how much the destinies of Europe and the institutions and happiness of Mankind, still depend, in spite of the pretended march of intellect, schoolmasters, the representative system, the press or what not, on the accidental character and will ‌of a girl of 18!³

Holland might distrust the monarchy as an institution but he was charmed by the young Queen Victoria herself. ‘Our little Queen has made courtiers of us all ‌and of me among them,’⁴ he wrote to Henry. When he first dined at court, she paid so much attention to him and Melbourne after dinner that the lord-in-waiting came over and whispered to Melbourne that Lord Hertford, who was sitting nearby, was showing signs of discontent at being neglected. The situation was saved when Holland tactfully asked the queen to wheel his chair from her side to the whist table and the mollified Hertford was then called to take his place.

Lady Holland, of course, was not invited to court; in fact she was more excluded from royal circles than before. William IV had frequently dined at Holland House, leaving Queen Adelaide behind. But the easy-going Regency morality which had continued into his reign came to an end with the accession of a woman to the throne. No one was more concerned that the young queen’s reputation should be above reproach than Melbourne. Even though Lady Holland was one of his dearest friends he asked her not to visit her daughter-in-law, who had a grace-and-favour house at Windsor Castle, while the queen was in residence. ‘I know if you do that, it will lead to discussions which you will not like,’ he told her frankly. ‘I believe I do wrong in telling you this, as I know it will give you a great desire to come; and if I said it did not signify, you would ‌probably think nothing of it.’⁵ Lady Holland, however, took the hint and did not visit Mary till the queen was gone. There was no escaping the double standards of the day. Queen Victoria, who took a lively interest in Lady Holland – not unmixed with jealousy, for Melbourne went to Holland House far too often for her liking – once asked him if she minded. ‘He shook his head,’ the queen recorded in her journal,

and said, ‘Perpetually; oh! She feels it very much’… [I] said, I thought perhaps she mightn’t mind the exclusion; Lord M. said, ‘Oh, she feels it deeply; there’s nobody who doesn’t feel it; I have never known anyone who didn’t feel it; many don’t wish to go, but ‌they don’t like the exclusion.’⁶

It might have consoled Lady Holland to have seen Victoria’s entry for 15 February 1838. ‘Lord Melbourne dines with Lady Holland tonight,’ she wrote; ‘I ‌wish he dined with me!’⁷

Melbourne’s relationship with the queen in the early days of her reign was perhaps the most important attachment of his life. Half avuncular, half in love, he was enchanted by her ingenuousness, her vitality, her directness, and by her obvious hero-worship of him. Even so, there were moments when he needed to escape from the stiffness of court life to the fun and sophistication of Holland House. Holland might be confined to a wheelchair, Lady Holland’s sharp tongue might show no signs of mellowing, but they still presided over the best company in London. ‘Such is the social despotism of this strange house…’ wrote the diarist Charles Greville.

Though everybody who goes there finds something to dislike or ridicule in the mistress of the house, or its ways, all continue to go; all like it more or less; and whenever by the death of either, it shall come to an end, a vacuum will be made in society which nothing will supply. It is the house of all Europe; the world will suffer by its loss; and it may with truth be said that it will ‌eclipse the gaiety of nations.⁸

Among the newcomers to Holland House in the late 1830s was the young Charles Dickens, recently sprung to fame as the author of The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. It was Lady Holland, ever alert to new talent, who sought him out, though her query to Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton as to whether Boz was presentable annoyed him by its condescending tone. Dickens however was delighted to be invited to Holland House but nervous enough to hope his friend, Serjeant Talfourd, through whom Lady Holland had sent the invitation, would be able to accompany him on his first visit. He first went there – with Talfourd – in August 1838. ‘We have had the author of Oliver Twist here,’ reported Holland to his sister. ‘He is a young man of 26, very unobtrusive, yet not shy, intelligent in countenance and altogether prepossessing. It was too large a company of strangers to bring out the fun ‌which must be in him.’⁹

Thereafter Dickens dined at Holland House from time to time, and embarked on an intermittent correspondence with Lady Holland, who was a warm admirer of his work. He once apologized for a muddle over dates – he had forgotten a previous engagement when accepting an invitation to Holland House – on the grounds that he had been distracted ‘by some imaginary persons [the Nickleby family] whose affairs have reached such a very complicated pitch just now that they sometimes confuse me in ‌my recollection of my own’.¹⁰ When Nicholas Nickleby was published as a single volume (having appeared in instalments previously) he presented Lady Holland with a copy. The accompanying note is worth quoting in full.

In begging you, my lady Holland to accept from me a copy of Nickleby in a dress which will wear better than his every-day clothes, I am not influenced by any feeling of vanity or any supposition that you will find in the book, a solitary charm to which you have not done more than justice. I must not scruple to say that I am actuated by a most selfish feeling, though, for I wish to have the gratification of acknowledging your great kindness, and I do not know how I can better do so than by this poor token; which I venture to send you – not for its own sake (for that would be presumptuous indeed) but simply and solely for the ‌reason I have just mentioned.¹¹

It was common to cast Lady Holland as the bad fairy of Holland House, ascribing all its good points to her husband. But for all her eccentricities and autocratic ways, her personality was as much a draw as his. (The proof of this could be seen after Holland’s death, when she continued to attract distinguished guests to the little ‘nutshell’ of her house in South Street.) As her relationship with Byron had shown, she had a real feeling for literature – though not for the Lake Poets – and neither he nor Dickens would have wasted time on someone whose opinion they did not respect. Henry Fox, incidentally, did not share his mother’s admiration for the latter’s novels. ‘I am very glad you did not send me Nicholas Nickleby,’ he wrote,

as I dare say I should not be more successful in reading that, than in getting thro’ the more celebrated and admired of that author’s works. I completely agree with what Lady Carlisle said about them. ‘I know there are such unfortunate beings as pickpockets and street walkers. I am very sorry for it and very much shocked at their mode of life, but I own I do not much wish to hear what they say to one another’… I suspect, when the novelty and the fashion of admiring them dies down they will ‌sink to their proper level.¹²

So much for Henry’s literary opinions.

In September 1838 the Hollands embarked on what would be their last visit to Paris. They stayed in some splendour at the Bristol Hotel, with Allen, Rogers and Macaulay (just returned from four years in India) in close attendance. Their old friend Princess Lieven, now living in Paris, and estranged from her husband, who had been replaced as Russian ambassador in London three years earlier, was full of gossip about their doings. ‘I see the Hollands a great deal,’ she reported to Melbourne’s sister Lady Cowper. ‘They appear to be delighted with Paris. She is in very good spirits, flattered ‌by everyone’s attentiveness to her.’¹³ And to Grey a fortnight later, ‘Lord Holland dined at Court. Lady Holland did not go; but the Queen sent her all her boxes for the theatres, by which piece of attention Lady Holland ‌appeared to be much gratified.’¹⁴

Louis Philippe went out of his way to entertain the Hollands. He offered to show Lady Holland round Versailles (she refused on account of her health) and granted Holland a private audience lasting two hours. ‘What a very clever fellow he is!’ wrote Holland. ‘It would be wrong in a Whig to laud a King for too much proficiency in government, but certainly one talks to no man in this country and few in any, whose conversation convinces one more that he is qualified to be the ‌Minister of a great nation.’¹⁵

The Hollands returned to London on 5 November, well pleased with their visit. Three days later Melbourne, who had been staying with Queen Victoria at Windsor, told her he was leaving for London the next morning. The queen could not conceal her mortification. ‘He said “I should like to stay [away] Saturday”,’ she confided to her journal.

‘Must you really?’ said I, much vexed; ‘I want to dine at Holland House; it’s as well to hear what he has got to say; I’ll come back Sunday’, he replied. ‘You must’, I said. I was selfish enough to be quite cross inwardly at this announcement… I said I dreaded Lord and Lady Holland’s return, as I knew she would get hold of him; and that Holland House was a great attraction, and that ‌I was jealous of it.¹⁶

For Melbourne it was probably Holland’s discussions with Louis Philippe and his prime minister Count Molé which were of greater interest than the charms of Lady Holland. Like Palmerston he was well aware of Holland’s pro-French bias, but his first-hand impressions were obviously of value, and it would be pleasant to talk them over in the congenial atmosphere of Holland House.

Meanwhile things were not going well for the government. The first years after the Reform Bill had witnessed great reforms; the Poor Law and the Factory Acts, however inadequate by later standards, were at least an attempt to deal with some of the social evils brought about by agrarian unemployment and the industrial revolution. Since then the pace of progress had slowed down. New troubles had arisen on the horizon: the rise of Chartism, agitation against the Corn Laws, a narrowly averted rebellion in Canada. The radicals had abandoned the Whigs in disgust at their lack of decision, O’Connell and the Irish MPs were unreliable allies, Melbourne himself was weary and discouraged. The administration limped on till the spring of 1839, when in a vote to suspend the constitution of the legislative assembly in Jamaica (where the planters were in open defiance of the government) the radicals combined with the Tories and the government’s majority was reduced to only five. Melbourne resigned, and the queen, on the advice of Wellington, sent for Peel.

The queen had burst into tears on hearing the news of Melbourne’s resignation, but she behaved with scrupulous correctness towards Wellington and Peel, and according to Holland abstained from any consultation with Melbourne or her former ministers. But she did not conceal her sadness at parting with them, and it was perhaps for this reason that Peel insisted that she also change her ladies-in-waiting, many of whom were the wives or relatives of leading Whigs, as a sign of her confidence in the new government. The queen indignantly refused. When Peel politely remonstrated with her, arguing that Ladies of the Bedchamber under a reigning queen were in the same position as Lords under a king, she smartly replied ‘that it did not place them in the House of Lords or give them votes and political influence, and that she did not see why, if her Ladies were her Lords, the Parliament should have ‌given her eight Lords besides.’¹⁷ A king who had practised his craft for 40 years could not have played his part better, thought Holland, who recorded the exchange.

The upshot of the Bedchamber dispute, as it was called, was that Peel refused to form a government without having the entire disposal of the royal household, including the ladies-in-waiting, in his hands. The queen took his decision as final, and Melbourne was accordingly recalled. The whole episode had been badly mishandled by Peel, whose awkward manner had helped to stiffen the young queen’s resistance. ‘Had the D[uke] of W[ellington] conducted the negotiation it would probably have gone well,’ Lady Holland told Henry, ‘but Peel’s vulgarity, stiffness and grasping, wounded the feelings ‌of the high spirited Princess.’¹⁸

The new government was in as weak a position as before and it was obvious that Peel was only biding his time. His moment would come in May 1841, when the government’s majority was reduced to only one vote, and the Tories were swept back to power in the election that followed. Holland did not live to see the defeat of his party. His health was in decline and his gout was increasingly painful and debilitating. But he continued to attend Cabinet meetings when he could, his greatest interest as ever being in foreign affairs. For the last 18 months of his life he was deeply involved in discussions over the Near Eastern crisis which had arisen when the Viceroy of Egypt, Mehmet Ali, declared independence from the Ottoman Empire, occupied Syria and, in June 1840, defeated the Turkish army sent to crush him. The French, who had close links with Egypt, were sympathetic to Mehmet Ali; the other great powers, concerned at the threat to the Ottoman Empire, were prepared to take strong measures against him. For Holland, to whom the Anglo-French entente was crucial, the prospect of a breach with France was deeply disturbing. When Palmerston announced his intention of drawing up a joint treaty with Russia, Austria and Prussia, pledging the four powers to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, without reference to France, Holland’s first thought was to resign. But he was afraid of damaging the administration if he did so: ‘The near balance of parties in Parliament,’ he wrote in his journal for 8 July;

the old adherents of Mr Fox who were partial to my name; the resemblance of the questions relating to peace to those upon which they had formerly adhered to Mr Fox and had been accustomed to support under him and with me… made me apprehend that my resignation, old and worn out as I was, might in fact [lead to] ‌a dissolution of the Government.¹⁹

Even in the last days of Holland’s life, the memory of his uncle was still potent. Melbourne indeed was fearful of upsetting the government’s fragile hold on power, and it was finally agreed that Holland and another colleague, Lord Clarendon, should attach a dissenting minute to the record of the Cabinet’s decision.

The French were furious when the proposal for the Treaty became known, even threatening to go to war on behalf of Mehmet Ali. Palmerston was convinced they were bluffing, but Holland, with several of his Cabinet colleagues, was desperately anxious that a face-saving compromise should be found. He continued to propound his views at Holland House, much to Palmerston’s exasperation. ‘Holland really quite foolish and superannuated,’ complained Lady Palmerston to her brother Frederick Lamb, ‘but with name and following and dinners, and activity of proselitism that was quite extraordinary, very good friends in the main with P[almerston] but thinking it fair to have all this cabal against him… in short friendly, but just ‌as he would in opposition.’²⁰

Drawing-room dissension was one thing; more serious were stories that reports of disagreements in Cabinet had reached Paris and Vienna, and that Holland House was said to be the source. Tactfully Melbourne suggested that the Hollands should exercise discretion. ‘I know not what can be done except to take care that as little of political affairs transpires in conversation as possible,’ he wrote to Holland on 18 October; ‘but this is inconsistent with a salon which has many advantages and some disadvantages, and more particularly when matters ‌of great importance are pending.’²¹

The Hollands entertained as usual on 19 and 20 October. On the morning of 21 October Holland woke up feeling very ill, with vomiting and a seizure of the bowels, and the family doctors were sent for. His symptoms, the effect thought the doctors of ‘internal gout’, became more alarming as the day went on and he gradually lapsed into semi-consciousness. It was obvious that the Eastern crisis was still preying on his mind, for ‘Egypt’, ‘Syria’ and ‘Palmerston’ were among the last intelligible words he uttered. ‘Illness – Illness’, wrote Lady Holland in the dinner book that evening. He died the following morning.

‘This wretched day,’ read the entry for 22 October, ‘closes all the happiness, refinement and hospitality within the walls of Holland House. E.V.Hd.’

Allen’s diary, written as Holland lay dying, contained a single word:

‘Alas.’