HOLLAND, HENRY RICHARD VASSALL FOX, 3rd Baron (1773-1840), was the son of Stephen Fox, 2nd Baron Holland, his mother, Lady Mary Fitzpatrick, being the daughter of the earl of Upper Ossory. He was born at Winterslow House in Wiltshire, on the 21st of November 1773, and his father died in the following year. He was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he became the friend of Canning, of Hookham Frere, and of other wits of the time. Lord Holland did not take the same political side as his friends in the conflicts of the revolutionary epoch. He was from his boyhood deeply attached to his uncle, C. J. Fox, and remained steadily loyal to the Whig party. In 1791 he visited Paris and became acquainted with Lafayette and Talleyrand, and in 1793 he again went abroad to travel in France and Italy. At Florence he met with Lady Webster, wife of Sir Godfrey Webster, Bart., who left her husband for him. She was by birth Elizabeth Vassall (1770-1845), daughter of Richard Vassall, a planter in Jamaica. A son was born of their irregular union, a Charles Richard Fox (1796-1873), who after some service in the navy entered the Grenadiers, and was known in later life as a collector of Greek coins. His collection was bought for the royal museum of Berlin when he died in 1873. He married Lady Mary Fitzclarence, a daughter of William IV. by Mrs Jordan. Sir Godfrey Webster having obtained a divorce, Lord Holland was enabled to marry on the 6th of July 1797. He had taken his seat in the House of Lords on the 5th of October 1796. During several years he may be said almost to have constituted the Whig party in the Upper House. His protests against the measures of the Tory ministers were collected and published, as the Opinions of Lord Holland (1841), by Dr Moylan of Lincoln’s Inn. In 1800 he was authorized to take the name of Vassall, and after 1807 he signed himself Vassall Holland, though the name was no part of his title. In 1800 Lord and Lady Holland went abroad and remained in France and Spain till 1805, visiting Paris during the Peace of Amiens, and being well received by Napoleon. Lady Holland always professed a profound admiration of Napoleon, of which she made a theatrical display after his fall, and he left her a gold snuff-box by his will. In public life Lord Holland took a share proportionate to his birth and opportunities. He was appointed to negotiate with the American envoys, Monroe and W. Pinkney, was admitted to the privy council on the 27th of August 1806, and on the 15th of October entered the cabinet “of all the talents” as lord privy seal, retiring with the rest of his colleagues in March 1807. He led the opposition to the Regency bill in 1811, and he attacked the “orders in council” and other strong measures of the government taken to counteract Napoleon’s Berlin decrees. He was in fact in politics a consistent Whig, and in that character he denounced the treaty of 1813 with Sweden which bound England to consent to the forcible union of Norway, and he resisted the bill of 1816 for confining Napoleon in St Helena. His loyalty as a Whig secured recognition when his party triumphed in the struggle for parliamentary reform, by his appointment as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster in the cabinet of Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne, and he was still in office when he died on the 22nd of October 1840. Lord Holland is notable, not for his somewhat insignificant political career, but as a patron of literature, as a writer on his own account, and because his house was the centre and the headquarters of the Whig political and literary world of the time; and Lady Holland (who died on the 16th of November 1845) succeeded in taking the sort of place in London which had been filled in Paris during the 18th century by the society ladies who kept “salons.” Lord Holland’s Foreign Reminiscences (1850) contain much amusing gossip from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era. His Memoirs of the Whig Party (1852) is an important contemporary authority. His small work on Lope de Vega (1806) is still of some value. Holland had two legitimate sons, Stephen, who died in 1800, and Henry Edward, who became 4th Lord Holland. When this peer died in December 1859 the title became extinct.
See The Journal of Elizabeth, Lady Holland, edited by the earl of Ilchester (1908); and Lloyd Sanders, The Holland House Circle (1908).
HOLLAND, JOSIAH GILBERT (1819-1881), American author and editor, was born in Belchertown, Massachusetts, on the 24th of July 1819. He graduated in 1843 at the Berkshire Medical College (no longer in existence) at Pittsfield, Mass., and after practising medicine in 1844-1847, and making an unsuccessful attempt, with Charles Robinson (1818-1894), later first governor of the state of Kansas, to establish a hospital for women, he taught for a brief period in Richmond, Virginia, and in 1848 was superintendent of schools in Vicksburg, Mississippi. In 1849 he became assistant editor under Samuel Bowles, and three years later one of the owners, of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican, with which he retained his connexion until 1867. He then travelled for some time in Europe, and in 1870 removed to New York, where he helped to establish and became editor and one-third owner of Scribner’s Monthly (the title of which was changed in 1881 to The Century), which absorbed the periodicals Hours at Home, Putnam’s Magazine and the Riverside Magazine. He remained editor of this magazine until his death. Dr Holland’s books long enjoyed a wide popularity. The earlier ones were published over the pseudonym “Timothy Titcomb.” His writings fall into four classes: history and biography, represented by a History of Western Massachusetts (1855), and a Life of Abraham Lincoln (1865); fiction, of which Miss Gilbert’s Career (1860) and The Story of Sevenoaks (1875) remain faithful pictures of village life in eastern United States; poetry, of which Bitter-Sweet (1858) and Kathrina, Her Life and Mine (1867) were widely read; and a series of homely essays on the art of living, of which the most characteristic were Letters to Young People, Single and Married (1858), Gold Foil, hammered from Popular Proverbs (1859), Letters to the Jonses (1863), and Every-Day Topics (2 series, 1876 and 1882). While a resident of New York, where he died on the 12th of October 1881, he identified himself with measures for good government and school reform, and in 1872 became a member and for a short time in 1873 was president of the Board of Education.
See Mrs H. M. Plunkett’s Josiah Gilbert Holland (New York, 1894).
HOLLAND, PHILEMON (1552-1637), English scholar, “the translator-general in his age,” was born at Chelmsford in Essex. He was the son of a clergyman, John Holland, who had been obliged to take refuge in Germany and Denmark with Miles Coverdale during the Marian persecution. Having become a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and taken the degree of M.A., he was incorporated at Oxford (July 11th, 1585). Having subsequently studied medicine, about 1595 he settled as a doctor in Coventry, but chiefly occupied himself with translations. In 1628 he was appointed headmaster of the free school, but, owing probably to advancing age, he held office for only eleven months. His latter days were oppressed by poverty, partly relieved by the generosity of the common council of Coventry, which in 1632 assigned him £3, 6s. 8d. for three years, “if he should live so long.” He died on the 9th of February, 1636-1637. His fame is due solely to his translations, which included Livy, Pliny’s Natural History, Plutarch’s Morals, Suetonius, Ammianus Marcellinus and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. He published also an English version, with additions, of Camden’s Britannia. His Latin translation of Brice Bauderon’s Pharmacopaea and his Regimen sanitatis Salerni were published after his death by his son, Henry Holland (1583-?1650), who became a London bookseller, and is known to bibliographers for his Baziliωlogia; a Booke of Kings, beeing the true and liuely Effigies of all our English Kings from the Conquest (1618), and his Herωologia Anglica (1620).
HOLLAND, RICHARD, or Richard de Holande (fl. 1450), Scottish writer, author of the Buke of the Howlat, was secretary or chaplain to the earl of Moray (1450) and rector of Halkirk, near Thurso. He was afterwards rector of Abbreochy, Loch Ness, and later held a chantry in the cathedral of Norway. He was an ardent partisan of the Douglases, and on their overthrow retired to Orkney and later to Shetland. He was employed by Edward IV. in his attempt to rouse the Western Isles through Douglas agency, and in 1482 was excluded from the general pardon granted by James III. to those who would renounce their fealty to the Douglases.