One of the most notable exceptions to this rule was the Holland House society during the first half of the nineteenth century. Politically Holland House was a Whig centre; but its hospitable doors were open to all who talked or thought. Fox, Canning, Brougham, Grey, Melbourne, John Russell, unbent there and discussed great themes and little. Rogers mocked, Sydney Smith laughed, Moore sang, Macaulay unwound his memory, and Greville listened and recorded. Wordsworth dropped a thought there, Talleyrand a witticism. Irving brought over the America of the eighteenth century, Ticknor of the nineteenth.
“It is the house of all Europe,” says Greville. “All like it more or less; and whenever ... it shall come to an end, a vacuum will be made in society which nothing can supply. The world will suffer by the loss; and it may be said with truth that it will ‘eclipse the gaiety of nations.’” Macaulay adorned the theme with his ample rhetoric: “Former guests will recollect how many men who have guided the politics of Europe, who have moved great assemblies by reason and eloquence, who have put life into bronze or canvas, or who have left to posterity things so written that it shall not willingly let them die, were there mixed with all that was loveliest and gayest in the society of the most splendid of capitals. They will remember the peculiar character which belonged to that circle, in which every talent and accomplishment, every art and science, had its place.... They will remember, above all, the grace, and the kindness, far more admirable than grace, with which the princely hospitality of that ancient mansion was dispensed. They will remember the venerable and benignant countenance and the cordial voice of him who bade them welcome.... They will remember, too, that he whose name they hold in reverence was not less distinguished by the inflexible uprightness of his political conduct than by his loving disposition and his winning manners. They will remember that, in the last lines which he traced, he expressed his joy that he had done nothing unworthy of the friend of Fox and Grey; and they will have reason to feel similar joy, if, in looking back on many troubled years, they cannot accuse themselves of having done anything unworthy of men who were distinguished by the friendship of Lord Holland.”
You will observe that little is said here of the mistress of the house. As regards Lord Holland, it is instructive to turn from Macaulay’s swelling periods to the cool comment of Greville, who was neither a rhetorician nor a cynic: “I doubt, from all I see, whether anybody (except his own family, including Allen) had really a very warm affection for Lord Holland, and the reason probably is that he had none for anybody.”
There was a mistress of the house and Macaulay elsewhere has enough to say about her. It is quite astonishing, the unanimity with which her guests combine to slight her character and emphasize her defects. Macaulay asserts, in the passage quoted above, that “all that was loveliest and gayest” met at Holland House. This is quite false; for few women went there. Those who did had little good to say of their hostess. In the early years before she married Lord Holland, Miss Holroyd wrote of her: “If anybody ever offends you so grievously that you do not recollect any punishment bad enough for them, only wish them on a party of pleasure with Lady Webster!... Everything that was proposed she decidedly determined on a contrary scheme, and as regularly altered her mind in a few hours.” Long after, Fanny Kemble expresses herself quite as bitterly: “The impression she made upon me was so disagreeable that for a time it involved every member of that dinner party in a halo of undistinguishable dislike in my mind.”
When the women condemn, one expects the men to praise. In this case they do not. All alike, in milder or harsher terms, record her acts that crushed, her speeches that stung. The gentle Moore takes Irving to visit her. “Lady H. said, ‘What an uncouth hour to come at,’ which alarmed me a little, but she was very civil to him.” Rogers told Dyce that “when she wanted to get rid of a fop, she would beg his pardon and ask him to sit little further off, adding ‘there is something on your handkerchief I do not quite like.’” She observed to Rogers himself: “Your poetry is bad enough, so pray be sparing of your prose.” And to Lord Porchester: “I am sorry to hear you are going to publish a poem. Can’t you suppress it?”
Also they paid her back in kind, with a vim which, in gentlemen, as they all were, seems to imply immense provocation. “My lady ... asked me how I could write those vulgar verses the other day about Hunt,” writes Moore. “Asked her in turn, why she should take it for granted, if they were so vulgar, that it was I who wrote them.” Croker records: “Lady Holland was saying yesterday to her assembled coterie, ‘Why should not Lord Holland be Secretary for Foreign Affairs—why not as well as Lord Landsdowne for the Home Department?’ Little Lord John Russell is said to have replied, in his quiet way, ‘Why, they say, Ma’am, that you open all Lord Holland’s letters, and the Foreign Ministers might not like that.’” Rogers was talking of beautiful hair. “Why, Rogers, only a few years ago I had such a head of hair that I could hide myself in it, and I’ve lost it all.” Rogers merely answered, “What a pity!” “But with such a look and tone,” says Fanny Kemble, “that an exultant giggle ran round the table at her expense.” And the table was her own! To Ticknor she said “That she believed New England was originally colonized by convicts sent over from the mother country. Mr. Ticknor replied that he was not aware of it, but said he knew that some of the Vassall family—ancestors of Lady Holland—had settled early in Massachusetts.” Finally, there is the almost incredible incident so vividly narrated by Macaulay. “Lady Holland is in a most extraordinary state. She came to Rogers’s, with Allen, in so bad a humour that we were all forced to rally and make common cause against her. There was not a person at table to whom she was not rude; and none of us were inclined to submit. Rogers sneered; Sydney made merciless sport of her; Tom Moore looked excessively impertinent; Bobus put her down with simple, straightforward rudeness; and I treated her with what I meant to be the coldest civility. Allen flew into a rage with us all, and especially with Sydney, whose guffaws, as the Scotch say, were indeed tremendous.”
One and all, they felt that the lady wished to domineer, to rule over everything and everybody, and they did not like it. “Now, Macaulay,” she would say, “we have had enough of this. Give us something else.” At a crowded table, when a late guest came: “Luttrell, make room.” “It must be made,” murmured Luttrell; “for it does not exist.” “The centurion did not keep his soldiers in better order than she kept her guests,” Macaulay writes. “It is to one, ‘Go,’ and he goeth; and to another, ‘Do this,’ and it is done.” Some one asked Lord Dudley why he did not go to Holland House. He said that he did not choose to be tyrannized over while he was eating his dinner.
Her friends thought she wished to regulate their lives, especially to regulate them in the way that suited her comfort and convenience. What could be more remarkable than the scene Macaulay describes, when she implored, ordered him to refuse his high appointment in India? “I had a most extraordinary scene with Lady Holland. If she had been as young and as handsome as she was thirty years ago, she would have turned my head. She was quite hysterical about my going; paid me such compliments as I cannot repeat; cried; raved; called me dear dear Macaulay. ‘You are sacrificed to your family. I see it all. You are too good to them. They are always making a tool of you; last session about the slaves; and now sending you to India.’ I always do my best to keep my temper with Lady Holland for three reasons: because she is a woman; because she is very unhappy in her health, and in the circumstances of her position; and because she has a real kindness for me. But at last she said something about you. This was too much, and I was beginning to answer her in a voice trembling with anger, when she broke out again: ‘I beg your pardon. Pray forgive me, dear Macaulay. I was very impertinent. I know you will forgive me. Nobody has such a temper as you. I said so to Allen only this morning. I am sure you will bear with my weakness. I shall never see you again’; and she cried, and I cooled; for it would have been to very little purpose to be angry with her. I hear that it is not to me alone that she runs on in this way. She storms at the ministry for letting me go.”
And she was supposed to tyrannize over her household as well as over her guests. The Allen referred to above is a curious figure. Originally recommended to Lord Holland as a traveling physician, he entered the family and remained in it. He was an immense reader, a careful student, and supplied many a Holland House politician with the stuff of oratory. He had opinions of his own, was a violent enemy of all religion, and was gibingly known as “Lady Holland’s atheist.” He did not hesitate to contradict his patroness and some even assert that she was a little afraid of him. At any rate, he was deeply attached to her, remained with her after Lord Holland’s death, and suffered himself in practical matters to be ordered about like a domestic poodle. Moore records an interesting bit of mutual self-confession, when Allen, after years of intimate contact with the deepest thought and brightest wit in Europe, admitted that to keep up conversation during these evenings was “frequently a most heavy task and that if he had followed his own taste and wishes he would long since have given up that mode of life.” And Moore himself adds that the “Holland House sort of existence, though by far the best specimen of its kind going, would appear to me, for any continuance, the most wearisome of all forms of slavery.”
Even Lord Holland himself appeared to his observant visitors to be subject to a domination at times somewhat irksome. “A little after twelve my lady retired and intimated that he ought to do so too,” writes Moore; “but he begged hard for ten minutes more.” Greville says that when some revivalists called on Lord Holland, Lady Holland was with great difficulty persuaded to allow him to go and receive them. “At last she let him be wheeled in, but ordered Edgar and Harold, the two pages, to post themselves outside the door and rush in if they heard Lord Holland scream.” On the great occasion of Macaulay’s going to India, it is recorded that the good-natured husband was goaded into a disciplinary outburst: “Don’t talk such nonsense, my lady! What the devil! Can we tell a gentleman who has a claim upon us that he must lose his only chance for getting an independence in order that he may come and talk to you in an evening?”