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‌Foreign Adventures

APART from occasional references to the garden, ‘delicious in summer’, Lady Holland says little of her new surroundings in her journal for the first years of marriage. It was as if she took the splendours of Holland House for granted, preferring to concentrate on the politics and personalities around her. But she devotes several pages to the history of the house itself. ‘This house,’ she writes in March 1800, ‘has contained many remarkable and interesting persons,’ and she goes on to ‌tell some of their stories.¹ Built by Sir Walter Cope in 1607 and originally known as Cope Castle, the house had passed by marriage to the first Earl of Holland, ‘a most accomplished and gallant cavalier’, who was executed during the Civil War for his support of Charles I. The first earl’s grandson Edward, on the death of a cousin, took on the second title of the Earl of Warwick. Edward’s widow, the Countess of Warwick, married her son’s tutor, the poet, essayist and statesman Joseph Addison. The marriage was not a success. The countess, observes Lady Holland, ‘always remembered her own rank and thought herself entitled to treat the tutor of her son with very little ceremony.’ Lord Warwick, ‘a disorderly young man’, despite the moral exhortations of his tutor, died unmarried in 1721; his successor, also unmarried, died in 1759, leaving the earldom of Holland extinct. (That of Warwick passed to another line.)

The Holland title was revived, though only as a barony, by Henry Fox, who rented the house soon after his marriage in 1749, and bought it 18 years later. During his lifetime, the house was ‘frequently the resort of the great politicians… Sir Robert Walpole, Lds Bute and Chatham, etc.’ It was also the home of the first Lady Holland’s sister, Lady Sarah Lennox, when the young Prince of Wales, later George III, fell in love with her, and but for ‘her levity and total disregard for appearances’ (the words are Lady Holland’s) might have made her his queen. His subsequent marriage to a German princess disappointed the ambitious Henry Fox, but left Lady Sarah emotionally unscathed. She went on to a tumultuous career, marriage, elopement and divorce, before settling down with a brave but impoverished army officer, George Napier, and becoming the mother of heroes – three of her sons were famous generals.

On the death of the second Lord Holland in 1775 the contents of the house, with the exception of the library and a few treasured possessions, had been sold at auction, and the house had been let till his son’s majority. As soon as they returned to England the Hollands set about putting it in order. The house itself was enormous – so large that William III had considered making it his palace when he first came to England – and had deteriorated badly. But their aim was to renovate rather than rebuild, letting its Jacobean character – its turrets, gables and tall chimneys, its mullioned windows and ornate plaster ceilings – speak for itself. Unfashionable at the time the first Lord Holland bought it, its picturesque qualities were now beginning to be appreciated, and the Hollands’ architect and supervisor, George Saunders, a fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, would have shared their feeling for its history.

First glimpsed through the trees from what is now Kensington High Street, the house was approached by a long elm avenue, culminating in an elaborate carved-stone gateway designed by Inigo Jones. As with many other great houses of the period, it was laid out roughly in the shape of an E, with a projecting entrance porch, and wings on each side. From an imposing front hall, peopled with marble busts, an inner hall led to the grand main staircase and the principal reception rooms on the first floor. The whole of the west, or left, wing of the house was taken up by the gallery or library, 90 feet long, with little cabinets for study set in along the walls, and portraits of writers and statesmen hung above the bookcases. Here Addison had paced as he mused over the next issue of the Spectator, here Fox had first acquired his passion for poetry and the classics, and here in the days of the third Lord Holland, ‘all the antique gravity of a college library’, as Macaulay put it, was blended with ‘all that female grace and wit could devise ‌to embellish a drawing room’.² For Macaulay, as for most visitors, the library was the heart of Holland House.

From the library on the south side, an arched recess led into the dining room, its red-silk walls hung with family portraits, its sideboard ‘glittering with venerable plate’ and its china cabinet gay with oriental porcelain. There were more family portraits, mostly by Reynolds, in the Crimson Drawing Room beyond: the first Lady Holland and her sisters, the Duchess of Leinster and Lady Louisa Connolly; the 14-year-old Charles James Fox in a conversation piece with his young aunt, Lady Sarah, and his cousin Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, another wayward lady, who scandalized her family by marrying an actor; the first Lord Holland; Caroline Fox as a little girl, with a puppy on her lap; Lady Holland as a ‘Virgin of the Sun’; Holland on his Italian tour.

Two other formal reception rooms led off the Crimson Drawing Room and Dining Room respectively: the Gilt Room, once the ‘Great Chamber’ of the house, its magnificent carved panelling and gilded decorations supposedly commissioned for a wedding ball for Charles I, and used by the Hollands as a dining room on grand occasions; and the smaller Yellow Drawing Room, hung with Flemish and Italian old masters collected on the Hollands’ travels. The east wing of the house was devoted to the family’s own apartments. Elsewhere on the ground and upper floors, there was ample space for family and guests to stay, sometimes for weeks on end, sometimes, especially in winter, to dine and spend the night.

Caroline Fox, who longed to have more of her brother to herself, objected to the constant stream of visitors, many of them foreigners exiled by war or revolution, who came through the house. Their overnight stays – requiring conversation at the breakfast table – were a further trial. Her brother remonstrated with her gently (incidentally giving an insight into the discomforts of hired transport at the time):

With regard to people staying to supper & to sleep and consequently returning to the charge at breakfast – now I ask you if you were a poor Emigrant, accustomed not only to the comforts but the luxuries of life and a climate much milder than ours, if you would like to go home of a night in the dark over a dirty and deep road in a Hackney coach (the horses of which have grown very bad from the dearness of corn and the short commons upon which they are consequently kept), the fares of which are double after sunset & the insides of which are stinking & disagreable & ill defended from the inclemency of the weather… and the ‌springs of which are gone?³

Caroline could only withdraw gracefully. Despite her grumbles she continued to be a frequent visitor to Holland House – too frequent perhaps for Lady Holland since, as she noted in her journal, ‘one half of my male and female intimates are placed at the top ‌of Miss Fox’s black list.’⁴ But the house, as it had been in the first Lord Holland’s time, was very much a family centre where relations could come and go as they pleased, and Fox spent the night on his rare visits to London. Here came Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s brother, the Duke of Leinster, and his mother soon after Lord Edward’s death, the Hollands entering wholeheartedly into their sorrows. The Duke of Bedford, devoted to Fox and one of Holland’s few allies in the House of Lords, was another frequent visitor. So too was Lord Lansdowne, a special mark of favour since he had become something of a recluse and seldom ventured out. With him came his two sisters-in-law, one of whom, Caroline Vernon, had recently dismayed her family by marrying Holland’s school friend Bobus Smith, 12 years her junior and with barely a penny to his name. The marriage, thought ‌Lansdowne, was a ‘profligate abandonment’,⁵ though he later relented enough to find Bobus a place with the East India Company. Lansdowne’s eldest son Lord Wycombe, an old friend from the Hollands’ days in Italy, was also a caller, till one day he saw his father’s carriage at the gates of Holland House and left in dudgeon never to return. Father and son were at daggers drawn and the Hollands, who were fond of both, were unwillingly caught in the crossfire.

Lady Holland had her own share of family dramas at the time. In January 1799, she gave birth to a son, Stephen, ‘a nice little boy, who ‌is going on perfectly well’;⁶ there were now two children at Holland House. But she missed her other children terribly. She managed to see the two boys, Webby, now at Harrow, and Henry, on a few rare occasions, and to visit her daughter Harriet in secret. But in the summer of 1799 she decided she must give Harriet up; rumours of her existence were going round, and she was afraid of involving Holland in a further scandal. She used her mother as her go-between in telling Sir Godfrey that the daughter he had mourned was still alive. To do him justice, he behaved extremely well, immediately acknowledging her and welcoming her back. Lady Holland felt bereft. She knew that everyone was talking about her, but she paid no attention to their stories. ‘I only feel I have renounced a darling child, and ‌my heart aches for it.’⁷ To make matters worse Harriet had been sent to boarding school, where her mother heard she was unhappy.

Then, on 4 June 1800, very early in the morning, the Hollands were awakened by a loud rapping on the bedroom door. It was Lady Affleck, who had come to tell them that Sir Godfrey had died, supposedly from a fit, the night before. ‘I could not hear the news without emotion,’ wrote Lady Holland,

and was for some time considerably agitated. But, my God! how was I overcome when Drew [the family doctor] showed me a note written to him by Hodges to apprise me of the manner of his death. He shot himself, he added, in consequence of heavy losses at play… Unhappy man! What must have been the agony of his mind, to rouse him to commit a deed of such horror. Peace to his soul, and may he find that mercy I would bestow.

It transpired that Sir Godfrey had been suffering from some kind of mental disorder for the last six months, and that he had twice already tried to kill himself by taking laudanum. On the morning of his death, he had gone out to buy a pair of pistols, and having found various pretexts to get the servants out of the way had shot himself in his front drawing room. Lady Holland could only be grateful that his death had not taken place two years earlier, at the time of her divorce: ‘The world and my own readiness to upbraid myself would have assigned my ‌quitting him as the cause.’⁸

With the death of Sir Godfrey most of Lady Holland’s fortune was returned to her. But any hopes she might have had of being reunited with her children were soon dashed. Even though Sir Godfrey had left no will, her former brother- and sister-in-law, Mr and Mrs Chaplin, obtained the guardianship of the children. They had originally been quite friendly to the Hollands, even congratulating them on their marriage, but their attitude had hardened after Sir Godfrey’s shocking end, and they refused to allow the children any contact with their mother.

The following month, perhaps to distance themselves from these tragedies, the Hollands left on a tour of northern Germany, taking their eldest son Charles, now four, the Bessboroughs’ 18-year-old son Lord Duncannon, Dr Drew, the Reverend Matthew Marsh (an old friend from their Italian days) and a numerous retinue of servants with them. They travelled extensively, visiting the courts of Brunswick, Hanover and Prussia and meeting notabilities and intellectuals, before returning – such were the privileges of wartime travel for English aristocrats – through the Netherlands and France on papers provided by the French authorities.

The last stages of their journey had been overshadowed by alarming news of their baby Stephen’s health. They reached home in October to find that he was critically ill. He died a month later on his father’s birthday, 10 November 1800. It was not until the end of January that Lady Holland could bear to take up her journal again. ‘After passing many watchful nights, and latterly for 8 together, by the side of my dear boy, he was snatched from me, alas, for ever!’ she wrote. She could not help feeling that if only she had not gone abroad he could have been saved, though the medical details of his illness – ‘two tubercles on his lung, and a pint of water on ‌his chest’ – made this unlikely.⁹ Three months later she was still mourning, though once again beginning to entertain and to take an interest in the changing political scene.

Even though he had withdrawn from Parliament, Fox was still a source of controversy. In January 1798 he had attended a dinner in his honour at the Whig Club at which the Duke of Norfolk, an ardent Foxite, proposed a toast to ‘the Majesty of the People’. The toast, in Pitt’s opinion, was little short of treason, and the duke was immediately dismissed from his post as Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding in Yorkshire. Unwilling to let him bear the odium alone, Fox repeated the toast at a Whig Club dinner shortly after. Wisely judging, however, that it was no use making him a martyr by bringing him to trial, Pitt had contented himself with advising the king that Fox’s name should be struck off the list of privy councillors.

The episode confirmed the general view of Fox as an unpatriotic, even treasonable figure. Blue-jowled and black-browed, his image appeared in countless caricatures in which his pro-French sympathies and revolutionary leanings were constant themes. Protected by his aristocratic status and connections, and contentedly installed in the country, he could afford to ignore his unpopularity. He had embarked on a history of his thrice great-uncle, James II, and the Glorious Revolution by which the rights of Parliament had been established: historical precedents for his opposition to the Crown.

In February 1801 the Act of Union with Ireland was passed, without its accompanying measure of Catholic relief, and Pitt was morally obliged to resign. The new prime minister, Henry Addington, supported George III in opposing Catholic Emancipation, but the illness of the king – brought about by the worry of the Catholic question – put Addington’s future in doubt. Once again the question of a regency was raised, and for a brief moment there seemed a possibility of the Whigs’ return to power. Rumours and counter rumours abounded. ‘The king is recovering as fast as he can, say the courtiers,’ noted Lady Holland; ‘Pitt’s people cautiously say he may amend, but it must be slowly; Opposition declare he is ‌as mad as the winds.’¹⁰

In March, the king’s unexpected recovery put speculations at an end. But faced with the exhausted state of the economy, Addington proved as eager as the Whigs themselves to steer the country towards peace. The signing of the Treaty of Amiens in March 1802 was greeted with general jubilation, though the terms were highly advantageous to the French, and it was soon obvious that it would not last. It was, said Sheridan, in an epigram which Holland described him as having heard at Holland House two hours before and borrowed without leave, ‘a peace which every man ought to be glad of but no ‌man could be proud of’.¹¹

Meanwhile the Hollands had had another son, Henry Edward. Born with a slight malformation of the hip, his health was fragile from the first, while Charles, his elder brother, had barely survived a series of bronchial infections the previous winter. They determined to travel to a warmer climate for the next one, leaving Caroline Fox to keep an eye on Holland House.

As well as their usual retinue of servants, they were accompanied by Frederick Howard, the 16-year-old son of Lord Carlisle, his tutor Matthew Marsh and, since Dr Drew was too unwell to travel, a Scottish physician, John Allen. Recommended by Bobus Smith, whose brother Sydney had known him in Edinburgh, Allen had been part of the brilliant intellectual circle who were soon to found the Edinburgh Review, sharing their literary interests and ardent belief in political reform. He was ‘a stout strong man’, wrote the Hollands’ son Charles, recalling his first impressions of him, ‘with a very large head… enormous round silver spectacles before a pair of peculiarly bright and intelligent eyes… his accent Scotch, his manner ‌eager but extremely good natured’.¹² His travels with the Hollands were the start of a lifelong friendship with the family, with Allen becoming not only resident physician, but librarian, confidant and social secretary of Holland House.

The Hollands intended to spend the winter of 1802–3 in Spain, but the signing of the Peace of Amiens made a visit to Paris a natural beginning to their journey. Two and a half years earlier, in the coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November) Bonaparte had become First Consul, an appointment which had just been confirmed for life. A host of English aristocrats, long starved of travel on the Continent, flocked to Paris to see the new dictator and the pomps of his military regime for themselves. Fox and Mrs Armistead (now revealed to the world as Fox’s wife) were among them; as well as surveying the political scene, Fox was planning to research in the Paris archives for his projected history of the reign of James II.

Holland, who considered that even the horrors of the Terror were no justification for a return to Bourbon rule, was cautiously approving of the new regime. It was true, he wrote to his sister, that the First Consul was a king in all but name, but he was ‘at least less likely to produce reaction, confusion and bloodshed than ‌any Bourbon king would do’.¹³ Many of the advantages resulting from the Revolution, such as the equalization of taxes, the abolition of obstacles to internal trade and the opening of careers to all talents, were perfectly compatible with a strong, not to say an arbitrary, government – but all would be lost if the arbitrary government were in Bourbon hands.

When Fox was first presented to the First Consul at a reception in September, Bonaparte greeted him with a speech which he had obviously learnt by heart. Its purport, reported Lady Holland, was that Fox was ‘the greatest man of one of the greatest countries, and that his voice had always been exerted on the side of humanity and justice, and that to its influence the world ‌owed the blessings of peace’.¹⁴ Despite these flowery compliments there was no real meeting of minds between them. In a small but telling moment when the two men talked in private, Bonaparte complained of the scurrilous attacks against him in the English papers. Fox, well used to press abuse, replied that in England such things were a necessary evil and that no one minded them. ‌‘C’est tout autre chose ici,’¹⁵ said Bonaparte, who would not have dreamt of allowing their equivalent in France.

Both the Hollands were presented to the First Consul and his wife at an official reception in September, a balm to Lady Holland’s feelings since in England she was not received at court. (She was not best pleased however that Mrs Fox was presented on the same occasion.) Later the Hollands would be notorious for their hero worship of Napoleon, but Lady Holland’s first reaction was more measured. ‘His head is out of proportion, being too large for his figure…’ she told her sister-in-law. ‘The gracious smile he puts on is not in unison with the upper part of his face: that is penetrating, severe and unbending.’ As for Joséphine, her figure and clothes were perfect, but her face was ghastly, ‘deep furrows on each side of her mouth, fallen-in cheeks… a worn-out hag prematurely gone, as she is ‌not above 40 years old.’¹⁶

The Hollands spent three months in Paris, fêted in the new society which had sprung up round the First Consul, in which old members of the aristocracy, encouraged back from exile, mixed with generals, former revolutionaries and beauties of dubious reputation who, thanks to their looks and their protectors, had managed to survive the storm. Holland revived his friendship with Talleyrand, last seen as a penniless exile in London, and now entertaining lavishly as foreign minister; Lafayette, by contrast, was living in dignified retirement in the country. It was a vivid, fast-moving scene, to which Bonaparte’s restless genius gave an edge of drama. It was clear that his expansionist plans had not abated. Already, when they left, there were rumours that the peace could not last, though the Hollands chose to disbelieve them. They set out for Spain at the end of September 1802, travelling in three large carriages; it was 12 years before they would see Paris again.