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‌‘The Best and Greatest Man…’

ONE of Holland’s aims in going to Spain was to seek material for a life of the great Spanish dramatist and poet, Lope de Vega. A contemporary of Shakespeare, de Vega was an almost equally universal figure; from the vast range of his work (he was said to have written 2,000 plays) Holland eventually translated 15. But both he and his wife were passionately interested in the contemporary scene as well. Indefatigable travellers, they moved from town to town, braving uncomfortable lodgings, entertaining or being entertained by local dignitaries and intellectuals, visiting convents, libraries and palaces, attending a bullfight (whose cruelty disgusted Lady Holland) and avidly following the politics of the day.

The Hollands left two accounts of their journeys in Spain. Lady Holland’s journal recorded day-to-day happenings, including the illnesses that punctuated their travels. Their children were both delicate, Holland was laid low by a prolonged attack of gout and Lady Holland herself almost died from a miscarriage. Her husband’s reminiscences, written many years later, were less personal in nature, and paint a fascinating picture of the characters and intrigues of the Spanish court. The Bourbon king, Charles IV, weak and slow-witted, was dominated by his wife, Queen Maria Luisa, who despite being plain and toothless – she had a set of teeth from Paris, Holland noted – was famous for her amours. The chief minister was her former lover, Manuel Godoy, created ‘Prince of the Peace’ for his part in negotiating peace with France in 1795. An alluring figure, with graceful manners and brilliant dark eyes, he won the approval of the Hollands for his brave attempts to challenge the vested interests of the Church and army. In foreign affairs, however, he pursued a pro-French policy which would lead to Spain declaring war on England in December 1804. By that time the Peace of Amiens had already come to an end – Britain declared war on France in May 1803 – and all English travellers in France had been interned. This time there would be no question of the Hollands’ going home through France, though they were in no hurry to return. They lingered on in Spain till the eve of the war, renewing and widening the circle of acquaintances Holland had made on his first visit there, Lady Holland now as fluent in Spanish as her husband.

At the end of November 1804, two weeks before Spain declared war on Britain, they crossed the frontier into Portugal, where after a brief stay in Lisbon they planned to take a house in the watering place of Las Caldas, in the hope that the baths would help Lord Holland’s gout and the weakness in his small son Henry’s leg. But the news that the French fleet had escaped from Brest, and that a packet boat was leaving immediately to take the information to England, offered too good a chance of getting home to miss. In 13 hours – ‘a ‌wonderful exertion’, noted Lady Holland¹ – they were ready to sail. They embarked at midnight and after a stormy voyage, in constant fear of enemy attack, they landed safe in Falmouth on 2 April.

Fox was delighted at his nephew’s return. ‘I cannot tell you how happy your letter ‌from Falmouth has made me,’² he told him. There were hopes for the opposition once again, and he was eager for Holland to play his part. Addington had resigned in April 1804, and three separate groups in the House of Commons, the Foxites, Pitt’s followers and those of the former Foreign Secretary, Lord Grenville, were united on the issue of Catholic Emancipation. Their attitudes to the war had entered a new phase too, even the Foxites agreeing that Napoleon’s aggressive policies – he had become emperor in 1804 – made its renewal inevitable. Pitt had tried to form a broad-based ministry, but it had foundered on the king’s refusal to accept Fox under any circumstances, and Grenville’s honourable decision not to accept office if Fox was excluded. Pitt had been forced to form his ministry without them, including not only Addington but a number of Addingtonians in his Cabinet, but the situation was fluid enough to bring the Foxites back into the fray.

Holland arrived home just in time to speak in support of a parliamentary motion by Lord Grenville to consider the removal of Catholic disabilities. Five years earlier, during the debates over the Act of Union, he had put forward a similar motion. Dismissed at the time, it was the first such initiative in the Lords. ‘I may perhaps indulge a little pardonable complacency,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘in reminding my reader that the great measure, commonly called Catholic Emancipation, which so many of its inveterate opponents were driven to adopt in 1829, was first moved in the House of Lords by ‌the writer of these pages.’³

Grenville’s motion, though backed by heavier guns, and supported by a mass petition from the Irish Catholics, was rejected by a large majority. The mood of the country was against emancipation; and the Prince of Wales, though professing sympathy for the measure, was too nervous of reviving criticism of his relationship with the Catholic Mrs Fitzherbert to support it. His defection, wrote Holland later, was ‘shabby and dishonourable’; however, the Foxites still had great hopes of the prince and he continued, as he had been before their absence, to be a regular guest at Holland House.

Lady Holland, always happiest in foreign climes, was sorry when their travels came to an end. She had been given an enthusiastic welcome by her family and friends, her mother, Fox and Lady Bessborough among them. ‘I liked to see them mightily,’ she wrote, ‘but a return to this ‌country always damps my spirits.’⁴ Despite her initial gloom, however, she was soon back in the swing of entertaining and, what was more exciting, of political intrigue. The resignation of Addington from Pitt’s Cabinet in July 1805 had once more opened the possibility of a coalition with the Foxites. Lady Holland was against it; she would have preferred an alliance with Addington against Pitt. ‘We dined at Holland Ho. yesterday,’ wrote Lady Bessborough to Lord Granville. ‘I am afraid she [Lady Holland] will do mischief; she has taken violently to Politics lately, is a profess’d Addingtonian, influenced by Mr Tierney, and opposes with all her might (and certainly with might on Lord Holland’s mind) all designs ‌of Union with Mr Pitt.’⁵

In August 1805, after prolonged negotiations, Britain formed a coalition against France with Austria, Russia and Sweden. Its first result was to divert the French army, which for the last two years had been massed on the coast near Boulogne; only the British navy had stood between Britain and invasion. In a lightning march Napoleon moved his army to the Black Forest, and while British troops were still preparing to embark for Germany, and the Russians were moving up through Poland, forced the capitulation of 30,000 Austrian troops at Ulm. The news reached Pitt, already struggling from illness and exhaustion, only five days before that of Nelson’s victory and death at Trafalgar. From now on Britain was invincible at sea, and the threat of invasion was at an end. But the coalition proved short-lived; on 2 December came the devastating blow of Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz. The Austrians surrendered four days later; the Russians and Swedes withdrew to their own borders. Napoleon’s dominance in Europe seemed unassailable.

The news of Austerlitz, by general agreement, sounded Pitt’s death knell. Fighting against increasing weakness, he lingered on till 23 January 1806. He was only 46. For Fox, the death of Pitt was the end of an era. For 22 years Pitt had been the great enemy, but neither had underestimated the other’s qualities. ‘Ah,’ said Pitt, to someone who had never heard Fox speak, ‘you have not been under ‌the wand of the magician.’⁶ And when Pitt died, Fox turned pale at the news. ‘It is as if there was something missing in the world,’ he told the Duke of Devonshire, ‘a chasm, a ‌blank that cannot be supplied.’⁷

Pitt’s death at last brought Fox into office, and the king, overcoming his loathing of his character and politics, was forced to accept him as the Foreign Secretary. Grenville was First Lord of the Treasury and nominal prime minister, Addington, now Lord Sidmouth, was Lord Privy Seal. The new administration, in which Fox was the dominating figure, was christened ‘the Ministry of All the Talents’; it was certainly one of all opinions.

Now at last seemed the moment to deal with the question of Catholic Emancipation. But Fox knew that he would not be able to carry it through Parliament, let alone convince the king, and that it would be better to postpone the matter till he could achieve his primary aim of making peace with France. On this, though not on the Catholic question, he would have the support of Sidmouth and the Addingtonians.

Fox was in charge of the peace negotiations, and talks in Paris began between Talleyrand and the British plenipotentiary, Lord Yarmouth. It was soon clear, however, that Napoleon was bent on further conquests and had no intention of offering concessions. Even Fox, who had so consistently argued for peace, could see no alternative to continuing the war. Meanwhile his health was beginning to fail. ‘I had been struck, on my return to England, with the change in Mr Fox’s countenance,’ wrote Holland.

The cheerfulness of his spirits and the charms of his conversation, soon wore out this impression. He was, however, more liable to slight indispositions than he had been; and, at the funeral of Lord Nelson, which I attended with him, I observed that the length of the ceremony, and the coldness of the cathedral, overpowered him in a way that no fatigue which I had ever known ‌him undergo had done heretofore.⁸

By May Fox was showing the symptoms of dropsy, probably caused by cancer of the liver. His friends urged him to retire but Fox, as he told his nephew, had ‘two glorious things’ to achieve, peace and the abolition of the slave trade. Peace was to prove beyond him, but he had the satisfaction, in his last speech in the House of Commons, of proposing a motion in favour of the abolition of the slave trade. The resolution was passed in both houses, and though the bill was not passed till after his death, he knew that it was safely set in train.

At the end of July Lord Lauderdale was sent to replace Lord Yarmouth as the government’s chief negotiator in Paris. Fox had earlier spoken of appointing Holland to the post, but by this time he was too ill to attend Cabinet meetings, and the decision had been made without him. ‘In his then state of health, I should certainly have declined it,’ wrote Holland,

but I own that I was weak enough to feel two minutes’ mortification on Lord Howick’s [Grey’s courtesy title on his father becoming Earl Grey] not giving me the option. I felt this more sensibly when, on approaching my uncle’s bedside after he had heard of, and sanctioned, Lord Lauderdale’s appointment, he said, with a melancholy smile of affection that I can never forget – ‘So you would not leave me, young one, to go to Paris but liked staying with me better – there’s a kind boy.’ He thus gave me credit for refusing what had never been offered to me, and I did not like to explain the circumstances for fear he might misinterpret my explanation into an expression of disappointment at not going. I answered: ‘Why, I hope I may be useful to you here; and I am sure if you like my being here, it would be very odd if ‌I did not prefer staying.’⁹

The following month, however, brought a consolation prize when Holland and Lord Auckland were appointed as joint commissioners to an American delegation sent to London to sort out some of the problems caused by the British navy’s high-handed treatment of American ships at sea. Holland was made a privy councillor at the same time. But his uncle’s health was growing worse, and he was now spending several hours each day talking or reading to him at his rented house in Stable Yard, St James’s. Lady Holland, ‘whom he will not see’, according to Fox’s old friend Mrs Bouverie, hovered nearby and did her best to keep out other female visitors. ‘She plants herself in one of the rooms below, under pretext of waiting for Lord Holland, and so prevents ‌his admitting any other woman.’¹⁰

On 7 August, after trying various remedies, the doctors decided on cupping to draw off the fluid from Fox’s distended legs and stomach: ‘sixteen pints of ‌amber-coloured water was drawn off,’¹¹ noted Lady Holland. For a few days he revived enough to think of returning to St Anne’s Hill. But although it was only three hours from London, the doctors thought the journey was too much for him. Instead the Duke of Devonshire offered him the use of Chiswick House, the exquisite Palladian villa designed by Lord Burlington, as a halfway house. Four months earlier the Duchess of Devonshire, who had flung herself so gallantly into Fox’s battles, had died in London, and Chiswick House was full of memories of their friendship. For Fox, it would be the final staging post. A second operation became necessary, which at first seemed to bring some relief. But the next day as he was led about the rooms at Chiswick to look at the pictures, a gush of water burst from his wound, and he fell into a state of alarming breathlessness and weakness.

Mrs Fox sent for Holland, who from that time never left him. Lady Holland of course came too, but though Fox behaved more affectionately to her than usual, even kissing her hand when she approached his bedside, she remained in an outer room while Mrs Fox and Holland kept vigil over him. He seemed to take comfort in seeing them, taking his wife’s hand continually, and opening his eyes with pleasure to see Holland: ‘Ah! young one, are you there? I have had had a hard tussle for ‌it, but all’s well now.’¹² When he was given a little claret, he talked cheerfully of having drunk five bottles in the past.

He had never been one for religious observances, but to please Mrs Fox a clergyman was sent for who read a prayer while he listened with clasped hands. Friends came to say goodbye, or waited in the outer rooms for news. The end came on the evening of 13 September. Fox’s last intelligible words were for his wife: ‘I die happy; bless you, I pity you.’ He died a few minutes later, apparently peacefully and without pain. ‘Poor Ld. H. had appear’d quite calm the whole Day, but then he sank down on the bed and was oblig’d to be carried out,’ wrote Lady Bessborough to Lord Granville. Lady Holland meanwhile had broken the news to those who were breathlessly waiting outside by appearing among them with her apron thrown over her head. Perhaps it was because of this, or some other unspecified eccentricity, that her behaviour during Fox’s last illness was greatly criticized. ‘The cry against her is dreadful,’ wrote Lady Bessborough. ‘A good deal of this is manner, and neither want of feeling or intention but ‌she really does act foolishly.’¹³

Few public figures have ever been mourned more than Fox. Adored by his followers, he was a symbol of free speech and the defence of civil liberties to thousands who had never known him; his bust by Nollekens was an icon in Whig households and debating clubs, not least his former gambling haunts at Brooks’s. For his nephew he was quite simply the

best and greatest man of our time, with whom the accident of birth closely connected me, from whose conversation and kindness I derived the chief delight of my youth and veneration for whose memory furnished me with the strongest motive for continuing in publick life, as well as the best ‌regulation for the conduct therein.¹⁴

It was a path he would strive to follow in the years to come.