Holland House

A History of London's Most Celebrated Salon

Linda Kelly

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780764498
• eBook ISBN: 9780857732965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Situated in the heart of London's Holland Park are the remains of Holland House – the site of what was once England's most celebrated political salon. In the first thirty years of the nineteenth century – when the Whig party were almost constantly out of office - the home of the third Lord Holland became the unofficial centre of the Opposition. Devoted to the ideals of Charles James Fox – the prominent Whig statesman who was also Lord Holland's uncle – and enriched by the progressive views of a new generation of writers, critics and politicians, the influence of Holland House permeated the political climate. Combining politics and the arts, the salon attracted the greatest names of the age - Byron, Thomas Macaulay, Talleyrand and Madame de Staël all dined at Holland House. At a time when revolutions threatened to engulf Europe, the Whig tradition of aristocratic liberalism - avoiding the extremes of radicalism and reaction – proved to be one of the chief factors in the peaceful achievement of parliamentary reform, epitomised by the Great Reform Act of 1832. The embodiment of this tradition was Holland House.
The salon was presided over by Lady Holland - a magnetic hostess. Beautiful and clever she had left her much-older husband, Sir Godfrey Webster, to marry Lord Holland and as a result was ostracised in many London drawing rooms. But in Holland House, society would come to her. Lady Holland was in the thick of Whig discussions, occasionally following her own political line. She had a special passion for Napoleon and sent him over a thousand books in St Helena.
Occupying a key position in the political and cultural life of the age, Holland House was a unique and important force at a time of great political change. Linda Kelly brings to life the colourful world of Holland House, providing a vivid portrait of London's greatest political salon.

‌1

‌Nephew of Fox

THE leafy expanses of Holland Park, 52 acres of gardens and woodland in the heart of Kensington, are all that remain of the once great estate that surrounded Holland House. The house itself, a palatial red-brick Jacobean mansion, was destroyed beyond repair in the last war, but the seated statue of its best-known owner, the third Lord Holland, still marks the meeting point of four main avenues, looking out across lawns towards the remains of his former home. He is an affable, indeed welcoming figure, somewhat stout, with rumpled gaiters and the same shaggy eyebrows as his uncle Charles James Fox. The plinth of the statue is in water, a stone-edged pond where ducks swim languidly, and the tangled undergrowth around is home to every sort of wildlife, not least the fox from which the Holland family took its name.

For the third Lord Holland the name of Fox had an almost religious significance. Brought up in the principles of his beloved uncle, Holland saw himself as heir to Fox’s political ideals and guardian of the family flame. Together with his wife, Lady Holland, beautiful, capricious and demanding, he presided over the most celebrated salon of the age. During the first 30 years of the nineteenth century, when the party was almost constantly out of office, Holland House was the unofficial centre of the Whig opposition. Devoted to the memory of Fox and enriched by the progressive views of a new generation of writers, critics and politicians, its influence permeated the political climate. At a time of revolutions across Europe, the Whig tradition of aristocratic liberalism, avoiding the extremes of radicalism and reaction, would be one of the chief factors in the peaceful achievement of parliamentary reform.

Fox had not begun life as a liberal. He had entered Parliament at the age of 19 in 1769 and had rapidly sprung to the fore as a debater, speaking off the cuff, with a careless brilliance that amazed his hearers. But his political conduct had been wayward. Appointed to the government in 1770, he had incurred the wrath of the mob by attacking the freedom of the press (on the grounds that Parliament should be pre-eminent), then infuriated the king by resigning in opposition to the Royal Marriages Bill, forbidding members of the royal family to marry without the king’s consent. The subject of forbidden marriages had always been a sensitive one in the Fox family. Fox’s father, Henry Fox, a shrewd but parvenu politician, had made a runaway marriage with the Duke of Richmond’s daughter, a great-great-granddaughter of Charles II. This act of near lèse-majesté had created a major scandal at the time though Henry Fox, having acquired an enormous fortune as Paymaster General during the Seven Years War and become the first Lord Holland, proved not such a bad match after all.

Fox was back in office as a junior Lord of the Treasury when his nephew Henry Fox was born in October 1773. The baby was jokingly hailed as a second Messiah, ‘born for ‌the destruction of the Jews’,¹ for his father Stephen Fox was in failing health, and Fox, who would otherwise have been his brother’s heir, had gambling debts of over £100,000 (approximately £12 million today). The birth of his nephew, removing his security with the moneylenders, threatened Fox with bankruptcy. He was rescued in the nick of time by his father, who painfully raised the money to pay off his debts before dying in February 1774; Lady Holland followed her husband a few weeks later. Stephen, the second Lord Holland, survived his parents for only five more months. Henry inherited his father’s title and estates, the latter heavily encumbered, when he was less than a year old.

The string of family tragedies did not stop here, for Henry’s mother Mary, ‘the most ‌amiable woman that ever lived’,² died four years later, leaving two children, Henry and his elder sister Caroline. Caroline found a home with her maternal aunt, Lady Lansdowne; Henry was brought up by his mother’s brother, the Earl of Upper Ossory, with Fox, who adored the ‘young one’, as he called him, as a benevolent figure on the sidelines.

Henry was still a baby when the American War of Independence broke out. Over the next eight years, abandoning his role in government, Fox made his name as a champion of the American rebels and a staunch opponent of the war. He took to wearing the buff and blue of the American forces – a blue jacket and buff waistcoat – and inveighed against the prime minister, Lord North, in a series of devastating speeches. Behind the prime minister he sensed the far more dangerous influence of George III. For Fox, the king’s desire to dominate his ministers was a return to royal despotism and a threat to the parliamentary freedoms won in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It was the start of a continuing battle against the power of the Crown and the encroachments of the executive. If not always carried out consistently by Fox himself it would become an article of faith for his nephew.

Fox’s dislike of George III was heartily reciprocated by the king. Although Fox’s father, the first Lord Holland, had been a useful hatchet man in the first years of his reign, George III had always disapproved of his son. Fox’s rakish habits were a byword. Unperturbed by his earlier losses, he continued to gamble recklessly, spending whole nights at the faro table, or returning muddied and hotfoot from the racecourse to take his place in the House of Commons. Worse still, in George III’s opinion, he had infected the Prince of Wales with his bad principles. At the age of 18, with a household of his own, the prince had reacted spectacularly against his strait-laced upbringing, running up huge debts, pursuing actresses, drinking ‘like a leviathan’, and imbibing opposition politics from Fox.

On 23 November 1781 came the news of the British surrender at Yorktown. It was now clear to everyone except the king that the war in America had been lost. In March 1782 the harassed Lord North resigned. A new administration, entrusted with the peace negotiations, was formed under Lord Rockingham, with Fox and Lord Shelburne as joint Secretaries of State. But the antipathy between Fox and Shelburne, an old political opponent of his father’s, made it impossible for the two men to work together. The death of Rockingham in July 1782 brought matters to a head. Fox refused to serve under Shelburne who, without him, was unable to command a majority in the House of Commons. Shortly after, to the amazement of those who had listened to his nightly diatribes against him, Fox formed an alliance with Lord North. ‘It is not my nature to bear malice or live in ill will,’ he explained blandly. ‘My friendships ‌are eternal, my enmities not.’³

The alliance of Fox and North made the defeat of the government inevitable. In February 1783 Shelburne resigned. After five weeks of vainly seeking an alternative, the king was forced to form a new government under the nominal leadership of the Duke of Portland, with Fox as Foreign Secretary and North in charge of Home Affairs. But, as one observer remarked, it was clear the administration would not last long, for the king, on Fox’s kissing hands, ‘turned back his eyes and ears just like the horse at Astley’s when the tailor he had determined to ‌throw was getting on him’.⁴

It took less than a year for the king to unseat Fox. The occasion was a bill to regulate the East India Company, placing the control in the hands of seven commissioners nominated by the government. The bill, in practice giving the patronage of the East India Company to Fox’s friends, was passed by a majority in the House of Commons. The king, however, was determined to defeat it. Having secretly ensured that the young William Pitt would be prepared to form a ministry if the coalition fell, he let it be known that any person who voted for the bill in the House of Lords would be considered by him an enemy. Although his intervention was clearly unconstitutional the king had sufficient power and patronage to ensure that the bill was overthrown. Fox and his fellow ministers were forced to resign, and Pitt became the First Lord of the Treasury, in practice the prime minister.

Fox would never forgive this act of treachery, as he saw it, though he could not foresee how long he would spend in the political wilderness as a result. Within three months of taking office, using a skilful mixture of patronage and coercion, Pitt had reduced the coalition’s majority to only one vote and forced them to call an election. The result was a disaster for Fox. One hundred and sixty of the coalition’s candidates, Fox’s martyrs as they were called, lost their seats. Fox himself, after a rowdy and hard-fought election in which for the first time he presented himself as a popular or ‘people’s’ candidate, was returned as one of the two members for Westminster.

At this point Pitt still called himself a Whig. But he relied on the support of Tory and royalist members and gradually, as the party system became more defined, he came to be seen as the leader of the Tories, as Fox was of the Whigs. Hatred of Pitt and mistrust of the king were part of the mythology with which the young Henry Holland grew up, and the great betrayal of 1784, when the king intervened to overthrow the government, would remain a reference point for ever after.

Henry spent a happy childhood in the care of his uncle, Lord Upper Ossory, a gentle, studious man in whose library he laid the foundations of his lifelong love of reading. He was educated at Eton where, as a junior boy, he had his first experience of oppression when his fag master insisted he toast bread for him with his bare hands; Henry’s fingers had a withered appearance for the rest of his life. Despite this unpromising beginning he went on to become a member of the sixth form and made friends with some of the cleverest students of the day, among them the future prime minister George Canning and Robert ‘Bobus’ Smith, an outstanding classical scholar whose younger brother, the clerical wit and polemicist Sydney Smith, would be one of the brightest ornaments of Holland House.

But his most important intellectual influence was Fox, whose warmth, intelligence and charismatic personality were irresistible to the fatherless child. From Fox he acquired a passion for poetry and the classics, as well as a precocious interest in the great political and constitutional issues of the day. ‘So thoroughly was he imbued with the views and sentiments of his uncle on these subjects,’ wrote the editor of his correspondence, Lord John Russell,

that he had only to dive into his own bosom, to find the motives on which Mr Fox would have acted… During his own political career, when any doubt or difficulty perplexed him, the first thought that occurred to him was, how would Mr Fox ‌have felt… on the occasion?⁵

Since the defeat of 1784, Fox had been the leader of the Whig opposition, a far more coherent body than had hitherto existed in English politics. In 1788 George III’s first attack of madness (or porphyria) had briefly offered a chance of returning to power, with the Prince of Wales as regent, but the king’s unexpected recovery had dashed their hopes, returning them to the wilderness again. Then, in 1789, came the defining moment in Fox’s political career, the fall of the Bastille. ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! ‌and how much the best!’⁶ was his famous response to the French Revolution, a position from which he never wavered through the years of bloodshed and upheaval which followed.

Henry was still at Eton when the Revolution broke out. But he was able to see something of it f...

Table of contents

• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 • Nephew of Fox
• 2 • Lovers’ Meeting
• 3 • In Opposition
• 4 • Foreign Adventures
• 5 • ‘The Best and Greatest Man…’
• 6 • Edinburgh Reviewers
• 7 • Spanish Journeys
• 8 • Enter Byron
• 9 • Towards Waterloo
• 10 • Defenders of Napoleon
• 11 • At Home at Holland House
• 12 • The Trial of Queen Caroline
• 13 • ‘A House of All Europe’
• 14 • Reforming Campaigns
• 15 • Family Matters
• 16 • A Surrogate Son
• 17 • Party Confusions
• 18 • Irish Affairs
• 19 • The July Revolution
• 20 • The Whigs in Power
• 21 • ‘The Bill, the Whole Bill and Nothing but the Bill’
• 22 • The Triumph of Reform
• 23 • Elder Statesman
• 24 • ‘This Wretched Day’
• 25 • Leaving the Stage
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates