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‌In Opposition

THREE and a half years after their first meeting, Lord and Lady Holland, as we shall now refer to them, had finally reached the safe haven of marriage. For Lady Holland, reflecting on the wedding in her journal, there was only one cause for regret. She was 26, her husband only 23. ‘The difference in age is, alas! two years and ‌eight months – a horrid disparity.’¹ But all else, scandal, the loss of her fortune, even separation from her children, was as nothing when contrasted with her present state. ‘My own individual happiness,’ she wrote, ‘is so perfect, that I can scarcely figure to myself a blessing ‌that I do not possess.’²

Looking back on her neglected early life, she recalled her lack of any kind of formal or religious education. She had been saved by her intellectual curiosity and her passion for books, but had been too eager to learn to follow any regular system and was more ignorant in some areas than a ten-year-old schoolboy. And then, at 15, ‘with youth, beauty and a good disposition all to be so squandered’, she had been thrown into ‌marriage with a ‘pompous coxcomb’.³

The connexion was perdition to me in every way; my heart was good, but accustomed to hear and see everything that was mean and selfish, I tried to shut it to the calls of humanity and used my reason to teach me to hate mankind… At Florence, in 1794, I began to think there were exceptions to my system, and every hour from that period to this, which now sees me the happiest of women, have I continued to wonder and admire the most wonderful union of benevolence, sense and integrity in the character of that excellent being whose faith is pledged to mine. Either he has imparted some of his goodness to me or his excellence has drawn out the latent good I had as certainly I am a better person now and a more useful person than I was ‌in my years of misery.⁴

It was a touchingly humble confession from someone normally so high-handed. In fact she was even luckier than she knew. Three years later a law making it impossible for anyone who was divorced to marry the person who had caused the divorce was put before the House of Commons; fortunately it was dropped after the second reading. Had it come into existence she and Holland would have been condemned to spend their life abroad, tossed here and there by the changing fortunes of the Napoleonic wars.

Meanwhile, secure in her new happiness, she could begin to rebuild her social position. Lady Bessborough, who called on them a few days after their wedding, found her ‘in famous beauty and he wild ‌with joy the whole time’.⁵ They were surrounded by family, Sir Gilbert and Lady Affleck, the latter all smiles now her daughter was safely married, Holland’s aunt by marriage Lady Upper Ossory, and Elizabeth’s son Henry, whom Sir Godfrey, as a rare concession, had allowed to visit her for a week.

The Hollands’ relations were rallying round. One of their first invitations was from Holland’s uncle by ‌marriage, the Marquess of Lansdowne,⁶ to stay at Bowood, his splendid country house in Wiltshire. Formerly Lord Shelburne, Lansdowne had been Fox’s hated rival in 1780, but time and their shared political sympathies – opposition to Pitt and the war with France – had done much to reconcile them. Lansdowne’s marriage to Holland’s aunt, Lady Louisa Fitzpatrick, as his second wife was a further link. It had been she who brought up Caroline Fox, who after her aunt’s death in 1789 became the adopted daughter of the house. Also living there were Lord Lansdowne’s unmarried sisters-in-law from his first marriage, Elizabeth and Caroline Vernon, step-aunts to Henry and his sister.

Two step-aunts, an uncle and a sister-in-law: for Lady Holland, who would meet them for the first time, it was a daunting prospect. Even her husband was a little nervous: ‘I must entreat you to look upon the first hour of her acquaintance as a blank because like many other shy people she is extremely awkward,’ he wrote to Caroline; ‘her shyness takes the form almost of impudence and she says all sorts of foolish things… as you may easily believe, my dearest little sister… I shld. feel miserable were the first impressions of her acquaintance upon ‌your mind to be unfavourable.’⁷

In the event the visit went off very well. Lady Holland, wrote her husband, was delighted by the kindness of her new relations, and they in turn, his sister assured him, ‘were all pleased beyond our expectation by finding her manners accord so well with ours & entirely free from that pedantry & affectation which idle report ‌had taught us to expect.’⁸ Lord Lansdowne was instantly won over. ‘My dearest Ld. Holland,’ he wrote when they had left. ‘Why shld. you not make an inn of this house or any other use you think proper. I shall be sorry if you and Lady Holland do not find it ‌the same as Holland House.’⁹

Fox’s attitude was more reserved and Lady Holland would always be a little frightened of him. Five years earlier, his enormous debts had been paid off by his friends; he had now forsworn gambling, and was living a domesticated life with Mrs Armistead (whom he had secretly married three years before) at his Surrey villa, St Anne’s Hill. Even in her journal, Lady Holland did not dare to breathe a word against her husband’s hero, but she was dismissive of his companion who, having begun her career ‌in a ‘certain notorious establishment’¹⁰ in Marlborough Street, had run through a series of celebrated lovers, including the Prince of Wales, before settling down with Fox. ‘Mrs Armstead…’ she wrote loftily,

possesses still those merits which, when united to the attractions of youth… placed her above her competitors for the glory of ruining and seducing the giddy youth of the day. She has mildness and little rapacity, but these negative merits, when bereft of the other advantages, constitute but an insipid resort… But I have often noticed that very superior men are easier satisfied with respect to the talents of those they live with ‌than men of inferior talents.¹¹

Holland had returned home at a dismal point in the Whig fortunes. Two years earlier, encouraged by the French Convention’s replacement by the Directory, Pitt’s government had put out feelers for peace, only to find that France’s external ambitions had not changed. Regardless of the threat to Britain’s security, she insisted on keeping her conquests up to the Rhine, and negotiations eventually broke down. One by one Britain’s allies signed separate peace treaties with France. In October, her last important ally, Austria, having been driven out of Italy by Bonaparte’s invading army, bought peace at the Treaty of Campo Formio. Britain now confronted France alone.

Pitt’s willingness to negotiate for peace – the main plank of the opposition’s policy – had taken the wind out of the Foxites’ sails. France’s refusal to give up her conquests made it impossible for them to go on arguing that the government was deliberately prolonging the war. At the same time, a motion for parliamentary reform, put forward by Fox’s disciple, Charles Grey, was so convincingly defeated that it would not be raised again for many years. Despairing of continuing the fight, Fox announced that his party would cease to attend the House of Commons in protest.

The decision to secede was taken at Holland House. ‘The 14th October [1797],’ wrote Lady Holland in her journal, ‘Mr Fox, D. of Bedford, etc. dined here, and it was then finally concluded among them that none of the shattered remains of their party should ‌attend the meeting of Parliament.’¹²

It was the first time since the death of Holland’s grandfather that Holland House had been the setting for political discussion. Fox’s Surrey villa was too far out for party meetings; Holland House, two miles from Hyde Park Corner yet surrounded by woods and fields, combined the advantages of a town house and a stately home. Born into the heart of the Whig aristocracy – ‘they are all cousins,’ someone remarked – and imbued with his uncle’s political ideals, Holland fell naturally into the role of host for Fox’s friends. It was one that had previously belonged to the Duchess of Devonshire, famed for canvassing for Fox in the Westminster elections of 1784, when she was said to have exchanged kisses for votes. But domestic and financial troubles and a series of agonizing eye operations had done much to curtail her activities. Lady Holland, who had first known her in Italy five years earlier, was shocked by the change in her. ‘Scarcely has she a vestige of those charms that once attracted all hearts. Her figure is corpulent, her complexion coarse, one eye gone, and her neck immense. How frail ‌is the tenure of beauty!’¹³

There was still a friendly overlap of guests with Devonshire House, but Holland House was very different in character. For one thing there was no gambling; unlike the Duchess of Devonshire, who had lost many millions in today’s currency at the gaming table, the Hollands had no interest in high play. Nor was there the same atmosphere of feminine intrigue. The Duchess and Lady Bessborough, like other ladies of the great Whig families, were familiar visitors, but even though Lady Holland was now married, the stiffer ladies of the aristocracy stayed away and the majority of the guests were men. Lady Holland felt it but not too bitterly. She had her own position as mistress of a splendid house, her husband, lively and ebullient, was an enchanting host, and she herself, in the full glow of her youth and beauty, could once more exercise her social skills. Together they made Holland House a magnet for those politicians still attached to Fox’s tattered standard, few in number, but making up in talent what they lacked in votes.

Among them was the future prime minister, Charles Grey, whose brilliant début as a speaker at the age of 22 had propelled him to the forefront of the party. Now in his early thirties, he had been the lover of the Duchess of Devonshire, eight years before; it had been she, according to Lady Holland, who had first attached him to the Foxite Whigs. In 1792 he had been a founder of the Society of the Friends of the People, an aristocratic left-wing group devoted to electoral reform. Discredited by the excesses of the Revolution, it lasted only a few years; in the long run, however, it pointed the way to the Reform Bill of 1832, when Grey, who lived to carry it through Parliament, would refer to his membership with pride.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, another habitué of Holland House, had also been a founding member of the group, though he was increasingly at odds with Grey, who regarded him as devious and unreliable. From his dazzling beginnings as a playwright, and still linked to the theatre as manager of Drury Lane, he had gone on to an equally dazzling career in politics, at his best outshining even Fox as an orator. Frequently the worse for drink – ‘Sheridan lost his dinner,’ Lady Holland noted on one occasion – he made himself forgiven by ‘a sort of ‌cheerful frankness and pleasant wittiness’¹⁴ she found impossible to resist.

Sheridan’s loyalty to Fox’s self-denying ordinance deprived him of the chance to show his powers in public, a sacrifice made worse by the fact that George Tierney, another Foxite MP, had ignored the call to defect and was now stealing much of his thunder in the House of Commons. Sheridan loathed Tierney as a result. Tierney, meanwhile, had taken an embarrassing fancy to his hostess. Lady Holland had not lost her instinct for flirtation, but she had no intention of endangering her marriage for his sake. ‘I told Lord H. of Tierney’s persecution,’ she wrote; ‘we jointly laughed at his vain presumption, and imputed it to his opinion of the depravity and corruption he believes ‌exists among women of fashion.’¹⁵

With the withdrawal of Fox’s supporters from the House of Commons, Holland became one of their chief spokesmen in the House of Lords. Unlike his uncle he was not a natural parliamentary speaker. His manner was hesitant and sometimes confused, from a rush of too many ideas at once; he was better in the brief exchanges of debate. Fox, who had retired, not at all unwillingly, to his books at St Anne’s Hill, did not attend his nephew’s maiden speech, a protest against increases in assessed taxes and the ‘calamitous’ war policies that made them necessary. ‘No person that got through his speech at all was ‌ever, I believe so frightened,’¹⁶ confessed Holland to his sister. But Fox was full of praises for its content. ‘I think your speech, whether well or ill given reads very well indeed,’ he told him, ‘but it was not the goodness of the speech only that I alluded to [in a previous letter] it was the stoutness of fighting so well, all alone against them all, and I really was delighted full as much ‌as I said and more.’¹⁷

It was true that Holland was fighting a lonely battle in the House of Lords; there was only a handful of other members who remained loyal to Fox. This did not prevent him from speaking out against the government whenever he could: its incompetence in running the war, its suppression of habeas corpus and civil liberties, above all its disastrous policies in Ireland, where a national uprising was already preparing in secret.

The failure of a French expeditionary force to land in Ireland in 1796 – only averted when the fleet was scattered by a hurricane – had dramatically pointed up the country’s vulnerability to invasion. The threat had spurred the government to drastic action. Their policy of disarming potentially disaffected areas had led to widespread abuses, the victims, mainly Catholic, responding with violence and assassination. By the beginning of 1798 the country was on the brink of anarchy. It was not until May that the storm broke, but it is hard to acquit Fox, contentedly studying the classics at St Anne’s Hill, of abdicating his responsibilities, leaving it to Sheridan to break his party’s silence and attack the government’s policies in the Commons.

For the Fox family the Irish rebellion would have a tragic personal dimension. On 19 May, Fox’s first cousin Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the leader of the rebel forces, was arrested in Dublin where he had been in hiding. His apprehension hurried on the revolt, first in scattered outbreaks round Dublin, then more seriously in Wexford, where a force of largely Catholic insurgents captured the town. From then on the revolution snowballed; for a few days the fate of Ireland hung in the balance as the rebels marched towards Dublin.

Meanwhile, Lord Edward, who had been wounded in the struggle to arrest him, was awaiting trial in prison. Fox and Holland both offered to go to Ireland to speak on his behalf, and were still trying desperately to save him when they heard that he had died of septicaemia from his wounds. ‘Death has placed the gallant Ld. Edward beyond ‌the reach of his enemies,’¹⁸ wrote Lady Holland sadly.

By the end of August 1798, the Irish insurrection had been crushed by superior government forces, leaving a toll of 30,000 dead and a legacy of bitterness which has lasted to this day. Its immediate result was to open the way for reunion with Britain. For 17 years Ireland had had its own parliament, which, though confined to the Protestant ascendancy, at least had a modicum of independence. But its failure to deal with the grievances of the Catholics, culminating in the horrors of the rebellion, had convinced Pitt that it must be abolished. By bringing its members into the wider context of a British parliament, the proportion of Catholics to Protestants would shift, and with the Irish Protestants no longer a minority, the question of Catholic Emancipation could be addressed. It had been Pitt’s original intention to make emancipation a keystone of the Act of Union, but seeing difficulties ahead he decided to deal with the two issues separately.

At first sight the government’s solution had all the virtues of expediency; in practice it would prove a disaster for both countries, sowing the seeds of discord for the next two centuries. While Sheridan, in the Commons, fought a hopeless battle against the loss of Irish independence, Holland was one of the few who protested against it in the House of Lords. There was no evidence, he insisted, that the proposed union was the right solution to Ireland’s discontents; to impose such a hasty and ill-considered measure on a population still ‘inflamed by civil animosity’ would merely exacerbate its grievances. Its main effect would be an enormous increase in the influence of the Crown, with no corresponding benefits for Ireland.

Like Sheridan’s, his was a Cassandra voice. The Act of Union, forced through by massive bribery of the Irish members, was passed in 1801. The hope of Catholic Emancipation proved illusory, blocked by the flat refusal of the king to countenance what he saw as a violation of his coronation oath. Pitt, to his credit, resigned over the matter; for Holland, it was a reaffirmation of the Foxite view of George III’s nefarious role in politics.

Although such political issues, taking place against the turbulent background of a European war, were constantly discussed at Holland House, it was far more than just a forum for the opposition. Both the Hollands, through their travels abroad, were familiar with the European concept of a salon as a cosmopolitan meeting place where fashion, learning and the arts could mingle, new talents be encouraged, and ideas expanded in the give and take of conversation. It was Lady Holland who took the initiative in creating such a centre. She knew she faced ostracism in most London drawing rooms. Her husband was too content at Holland House to go out on his own. Society must come to them. ‘Mixing with a wide variety of people,’ she wrote,

is an advantage to Lord H., because as he, thank God, lives constantly at home, unless I were active in collecting fresh materials he might be too apt to fall into a click [clique], a calamity no abilities can fight against. Ideas get contracted, prejudices strong and the whole mind narrowed… Mankind was made to live together; the more they mix with each other the better able a man is to judge them and conduct himself; otherwise it becomes what a priest once said of the universal ‌truth, ‘Orthodoxy is my doxy.’¹⁹

It was this open-mindedness, this readiness to embrace new people and ideas, which would make Holland House such a powerhouse in the years to come.