‌6

‌Edinburgh Reviewers

SHORTLY before his last illness, Fox paid a farewell visit to Holland House and walked all over the grounds, ‘looking tenderly at each familiar spot, as if he wished to carry through the gates of death the impressions engraved ‌on his soul during childhood.’¹ Here he had been brought up, and here, while his nephew was alive, his memory and his principles would be kept green.

The word ‘Whig’ had had many meanings during the previous century. At the outset the Whigs had been the party represented by that group of powerful families who had brought William and Mary to the throne in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and asserted the rights of Parliament against the absolute monarchy of James II. It had been George III’s desire to shift this balance by taking control into his own hands that Fox had consistently opposed, though the king’s recurring illnesses, the French Revolution and the continuing war with France had greatly changed the picture since the so-called betrayal of 1784.

Till now the Whig objectives had been driven by the great landed families, interconnected by marriage and friendship, who saw themselves as the guardians of the country’s liberties. It was a guardianship based on property; though there had always been brilliant outsiders, like Burke and Sheridan, the real power rested in the hands of the aristocrats, who regarded themselves as the natural leaders of the party. Paradoxically, the Tories had always been more open to talent; Holland’s old friend Canning, the son of an actress, for instance, knew that he could never hope to obtain high office under the Whigs.

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the chief forum for the Whigs had been the Houses of Parliament, and the press, though often scathing in its abuse of individual figures, from Fox and Sheridan to the increasingly corpulent Prince of Wales, had been more inclined to report on current issues than to widen the debate. But in October 1802, three brilliant young men from Edinburgh, Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham and the Reverend Sydney Smith, had opened up a whole new era in journalism with the foundation of their quarterly, the Edinburgh Review. Broadly Whig in politics, as reflected in the buff and blue (Fox’s colours) of the cover, it rapidly acquired an enormous influence as a force for social change: Catholic Emancipation, electoral reform, the abolition of slavery, the end of flogging in the army and the repeal of the barbarous game laws were among the many causes it espoused. Fox had been the great precursor, but the Edinburgh Review would take his ideas further, and provide the intellectual framework for a new generation of Whig writers and politicians.

By the time the Hollands returned from Spain, both Smith and Brougham had moved to London, leaving Jeffrey, based in Edinburgh, as the official editor of the magazine. Brougham, studying law at Lincoln’s Inn, was a tireless and versatile contributor, Smith almost equally so. Brougham’s articles were savage and hard-hitting; Smith made ridicule his chief weapon. As well as contributing to the Edinburgh Review, he had recently embarked on a series of lectures on moral philosophy at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street. The lectures were wildly successful, attracting such crowds that the street was blocked by carriages, and creating, said Smith, ‘such an uproar as I never remember to have been excited ‌by any other literary imposture’.²

It was natural that Brougham and Smith should gravitate to Holland House; both were friends of Allen, himself a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and Smith’s brother Bobus was married to Lord Holland’s aunt. A little overawed at first, Smith was soon singing the praises of his hosts. ‘With Lady Holland I believe you are acquainted,’ he wrote to the Scottish jurist Sir James Mackintosh in the autumn of 1805. ‘I am lately become so. She is very handsome, very clever and I think very agreeable.’ As for Lord Holland:

I hardly know a talent or virtue he has not, little or big. The devil himself could not put him out of temper, nor is in any way inferior to him in acuteness. In addition to this, think of his possessing Holland House, and that he reposes every evening on that beautiful structure of ‌flesh and blood, Lady H.³

It was the start of a lasting relationship with Holland House, Smith’s witty tongue, stout figure and Fox-like black eyebrows becoming almost as much part of its legend as his hosts themselves. Brougham was less easily domesticated. He objected to Lady Holland’s imperious ways. Smith would cheerfully give as good as he got, but Brougham was inclined to take umbrage. ‘George Lamb says he [Brougham] always leaves Holland House the moment she begins ordering and giving herself ‌airs,’ reported a fellow guest.⁴ But at least in his early days he enjoyed the patronage of Holland House, much valued for his clever pen and his consistent harrying of the Tories.

In the government reshuffle that followed Fox’s death, Holland was made Lord Privy Seal. At one point Fox had hoped that his nephew would follow him as Foreign Secretary and had promised to oversee his progress. ‘It will be nice too,’ he had added with a smile, ‘for it will secure my seeing you at St ‌Anne’s when I am there.’⁵ But Fox’s death had put paid to such plans and Lord Howick (Grey), Fox’s successor as leader of the Foxite Whigs, succeeded him as Foreign Secretary as well.

Even though it was a lesser post, Holland’s new appointment gave him a seat in the Cabinet. Lady Holland made the most of her husband’s new position. ‘She is much too official and boasts of knowing things, which either she does not know, or she proves by that very boast, that she ought ‌not to have been told…’⁶ wrote Lady Bessborough. ‘On being ask’d what some papers were, she put on a mysterious air, saying, “Oh, these are Cabinet Secrets – some papers Ld. Grenville has sent Ld. Holland to look at before they are carried to the King.”’

Lady Holland was now 34, still very beautiful in a full-blown way. But she had had eight children – a daughter, Mary, had been born in the spring of 1806 – and had reached an age when making new conquests was less interesting than political intrigue. Sydney Smith was one of the first beneficiaries of her wire-pulling; in 1806, she persuaded the Lord Chancellor Lord Erskine to give him the living of Foxton-le-Clay in Yorkshire. When Smith went to thank him, the Chancellor refused to take any credit: ‘Oh don’t thank me, Mr Smith. I gave you the living because Lady Holland insisted I should do so; and if she had desired me to give to the devil, ‌he must have had it.’⁷ Since Smith was able to put in a neighbouring curate till 1809, when the rules requiring clergymen to reside in their own parishes were tightened, he continued to be a regular guest at Holland House. We see him there, on an evening before Christmas, in a letter from Lady Bessborough to Lord Granville:

At the Hollands there were a motley company of Lawyers, statesmen, Critics and divines – Sydney Smith the only one of the latter class, in high glee attacking Mr Ward and Mr Allen telling them that the best way to keep a merry Xmas was to roast a Scotch Atheist as the most intolerant and arrogant of all two legged animals. Allen [a diehard atheist] did not look pleas’d, but kept clasping his hands together till his fingers crack’d (a great trick of his). S.S. call’d out, ‘See! there’s ‌one beginning to crackle already.’⁸

As a clergyman Smith was something of an exception at Holland House. Most of the Whigs, and certainly the Hollands, were sceptics or at best conventionally religious. Tolerant themselves, they were committed to the idea of religious toleration, in particular Catholic Emancipation, not only as a matter of natural justice, but as the only hope of calming Irish discontents.

It was the question of Catholic Emancipation, or rather a small step towards it, which would bring about the downfall of the Ministry of All the Talents in March 1807. The immediate cause was a measure to conciliate the Irish by allowing Catholics to become senior officers in the British army. For the king it was a step too far, a potential violation of his coronation oath. He demanded a pledge from Grenville that the Cabinet would never reopen the Catholic question again. Grenville firmly but courteously refused, and after nine days of uncertainty while the king tried to form a new administration, the ageing Duke of Portland was prevailed upon to head a broadly Tory ministry. ‘The time will come,’ wrote Macaulay, admittedly a Whig historian,

when posterity will do justice to the Whigs of England, and will faithfully relate how they suffered for Ireland; how for the sake of Ireland they remained out of office for more than 20 years, braving the frowns of the court, braving the hisses of the multitude, renouncing power and patronage and salaries, and peerages, and garters, and yet not receiving in return ‌even a little fleeting popularity.⁹

It was true that the Whigs got no credit for their principles, and the party was roundly defeated in the next election. The cry of ‘no popery’ was still potent; most people ignored or dismissed the problems of Ireland, and the age and infirmity of the king had only increased his popularity with the general public. But though out of office, they continued to fight for Catholic Emancipation from the sidelines, finding their most powerful spokesman, unexpectedly, in the person of the Church of England clergyman, Sydney Smith.

In the summer of 1807 the first of a series of satirical pamphlets, The Letters of Peter Plymley, was published. Supposedly sent by Plymley to his brother Abraham, a country clergyman, and written in a rumbustious style that closely resembled Smith’s own conversation, they launched a devastating attack on the bigotry and folly of the government’s attitude to Catholic Emancipation. The situation had never been more dangerous. There were nearly five million Catholics in Ireland; Napoleon was winning hearts and minds in other countries by his tolerance of all religions:

To deny the Irish this justice now, in the present state of Europe, and in the summer months, just as the season for conquering kingdoms is coming on, is (beloved Abraham), whatever you may think of ‌it, little short of insanity.¹⁰

But reason, as the pamphlets showed, had little to do with the public’s – or Plymley’s fellow clergy’s – perception of the question:

The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence and common sense and to act with the barbarity of tyrants ‌and the fatuity of idiots.¹¹

The effect of the letters (ten in all) was compared to a spark on a heap of gunpowder; there had been nothing like them since the days of Swift, thought Holland. From the drawing rooms of London they quickly spread across the country, each new letter increasing the eagerness and curiosity of the public. The collected edition was reprinted 16 times in the first year, and cheaper editions were specially printed for sale in Ireland. ‘Far more than to any other cause,’ writes Smith’s biographer Hesketh Pearson, ‘the Catholics in Great Britain and Ireland could attribute the general feeling in favour of their emancipation, when at last it was manifested, to the common sense, wit ‌and ridicule of Sydney Smith.’¹²

The letters were published anonymously, and despite all the efforts of the authorities, their authorship was not discovered till 30 years later when Smith included them in his collected works. Till then, remembering that Swift had lost a bishopric through being too witty, Smith wisely denied all responsibility for them, though it was an open secret among his friends at Holland House. But he kept up the pretence just the same. ‘Mr Allen has mentioned to me the letters of a Mr Plymley, which I have… read with some entertainment,’ he wrote to Lady Holland.

My conjecture lies between three persons – Sir Samuel Romilly, Sir Arthur Pigott or Mr Horner – for the name of Plymley is evidently fictitious! I shall be very happy to hear your conjectures on this subject on Saturday, when I hope you will let me dine ‌with you at Holland House.¹³

Despite their political setbacks the Hollands were continuing to receive on a grand scale. The French chef was paid a princely 110 guineas a year; the pastry cook got 60. The dinner book, kept by Allen, sometimes recorded as many as 50 guests. In July the Prince of Wales came to dinner, and wittily routed Sydney Smith who, in the course of a conversation on ‘wicked men’, asserted that Philippe d’Orléans, regent in France between 1715 and 1723, was the wickedest man that ever lived – ‘and he,’ he said pointedly, ‘was a prince.’ ‘No,’ said the prince, ‘the wickedest man that ever lived was Cardinal Dubois, the regent’s prime minister, and he ‌was a priest, Mr Sydney.’¹⁴

There was still fun and good conversation to be had at Holland House, but some of the urgency had gone out of things. ‘The loss of all interest in public affairs was the natural effect of the ‌change of Administration to me,’¹⁵ noted Lady Holland. For her husband, as it had been for Fox, there was always consolation to be had in books. In 1806 he had published his biography of Lope de Vega, collecting many praises for its easy, lucid style, and at the same time adding to his library a unique collection of Lope de Vega manuscripts and printed books. He then set about editing and publishing his uncle’s unfinished Early Life of James II, adding a preface of his own. But Fox, so magical as a speaker, was not a natural writer and the book was generally considered rather dull. Holland wrote far better than his uncle.

Meanwhile events in Europe had taken a new turn. Although the Spanish had declared war on Britain in 1804, the defeat of the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in 1805 had dampened their enthusiasm – never very great – for continuing. Napoleon, triumphant in northern Europe, was now casting his eye on the Iberian peninsula. In November 1807 the French army invaded Portugal, though not before the Portuguese fleet and royal family had fled to Brazil. French troops, ostensibly intended for the invasion of Portugal, were also massed in Spain. In the spring of 1808 Godoy was overthrown, and following the disputed abdication of Charles IV in favour of his son Ferdinand, Napoleon seized the crown for his brother Joseph instead. Ferdinand was sent off to comfortable house imprisonment in France, but the Spanish people refused to accept their subjugation so tamely. The first of a series of risings took place in Madrid in May, banishing the French and sparking off a national resistance; the Portuguese too rose up against the invaders. The British, seeing their opportunity, sent troops to the peninsula under Sir Arthur Wellesley. In August 1808, after their defeat at the Battle of Vimeiro, the French were forced to evacuate their troops from Portugal, and to sign an armistice at the Treaty of Cintra.

Napoleon was now free to concentrate his energies on Spain, mustering an army of a quarter of a million men to carry out the invasion. For the Hollands, always passionately interested in Spanish affairs, it was a chance to take part in a national war of liberty against the French and perhaps to influence events. Ignoring the protests of friends and relations, from Brougham, who accused them of deserting the Whig cause, to Caroline, who thought they were abandoning their children, they determined to set out for Spain. ‘Think of the Hollands going to Spain,’ exclaimed Lady Bessborough to Lord Granville.

Why for? as Ly. Harrington would say… I shd. not think Ly. H., with all her attendants and wants, a good follower of the camp. Neither she nor Ld. H. would make famous warriors; as to counsel in a civil capacity, much as I love Ld. Holland, I should be sorry to have him ‌interfere, and still more her.¹⁶

The Tory government had no desire for Holland’s services as an unofficial envoy, as Canning, then Foreign Secretary, made clear to the Spanish authorities and to Holland himself. His presence in a war zone could only be an embarrassment to the army. But the Hollands had the bit between their teeth. On 8 October 1808, accompanied by Dr Allen and the 16-year-old son of the Duke of Bedford, Lord John Russell, as well as two maids and six manservants, they left Holland House for Falmouth on the first stage of their journey. ‘Well my dear little sister,’ Lord Holland told Caroline,

though not launched we are off – they all say it is a wild scheme though I cannot see why or how, and can only beg you in Dryden’s words

…O defend

Against ‌your judgement your departed friend.¹⁷

On 4 November, after long delays caused by bad weather, they set sail for Corunna on a British frigate.