The character of Holles has been drawn by Burnet, with whom he was on terms of friendship. “Hollis was a man of great courage and of as great pride.... He was faithful and firm to his side and never changed through the whole course of his life.... He argued well but too vehemently; for he could not bear contradiction. He had the soul of an old stubborn Roman in him. He was a faithful but a rough friend, and a severe but fair enemy. He had a true sense of religion; and was a man of an unblameable course of life and of a sound judgment when it was not biased by passion.”[3] Holles was essentially an aristocrat and a Whig in feeling, making Cromwell’s supposed hatred of “Lords” a special charge against him; regarding the civil wars rather as a social than as a political revolution, and attributing all the evils of his time to the transference of political power from the governing families to the “meanest of men.” He was an authority on the history and practice of parliament and the constitution, and besides the pamphlets already mentioned was the author of The Case Stated concerning the Judicature of the House of Peers in the Point of Appeals (1675); The Case Stated of the Jurisdiction of the House of Lords in the point of Impositions (1676); Letter of a Gentleman to his Friend showing that the Bishops are not to be judges in Parliament in Cases Capital (1679); Lord Holles his Remains, being a 2nd letter to a Friend concerning the judicature of the Bishops in Parliament....[4] He also published A True Relation of the unjust accusation of certain French gentlemen (1671), an account of Holles’s intercession on their behalf and of his dispute with Lord Chief Justice Keeling; and he left Memoirs, written in exile in 1649, and dedicated “to the unparalleled Couple, Mr Oliver St John ... and Mr Oliver Cromwell....” published in 1699 and reprinted in Baron Maseres’s Select Tracts relating to the Civil Wars, i. 189. Several speeches of Holles were printed and are extant, and his Letter to Van Beuninghen has been already quoted.
Holles married (1) in 1628 Dorothy, daughter and heiress of Sir Francis Ashley; (2) in 1642 Jane, daughter and co-heiress of Sir John Shirley of Ifield in Sussex and widow of Sir Walter Covert of Slougham, Sussex; and (3) in 1666 Esther, daughter and co-heiress of Gideon Le Lou of Columbiers in Normandy, widow of James Richer. By his first wife he left one son, Francis, who succeeded him as 2nd baron. He had no children by his other wives, and the peerage became extinct in the person of his grandson Denzil, 3rd Baron Holles, in 1694, the estates devolving on John Holles (1662-1711), 4th earl of Clare and duke of Newcastle.
Holles’s brother, John Holles, 2nd earl of Clare (1595-1666), was member of parliament for East Retford in three parliaments before succeeding to the peerage in 1637. He took some part in the Civil War, but “he was very often of both parties, and never advantaged either.” The earldom of Clare, which had been granted in 1624 by James I. to his father, John Holles, in return for the payment of £5000, became merged in the dukedom of Newcastle in 1694, when John Holles, the 4th earl, was created duke of Newcastle.
Holles’s Life has been written by C. H. Firth in the Dictionary of National Biography; by Horace Walpole in Royal and Noble Authors, ii. 28; by Guizot in Monk’s Contemporaries (Eng. trans., 1851); and by A. Collins in Historical Collections of Noble Families (1752), and in the Biographia Britannica. See also S. R. Gardiner, History of England (1883-1884), and History of the Great Civil War (1893); Lord Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, edited by W. D. Macray; G. Burnet, History of His Own Time (1833); and B. Whitelock, Memorials (1732).
(P. C. Y.)
[1] Hist. MSS. Comm., MSS. of Earl Cowper, i. 422.
[2] The speech of January 5 attributed to him and printed in Thomason Tracts, E 199 (55), is a forgery.
[3] Burnet’s History of His Own Times, vi. 257, 268.
[4] The rough draft, apparently in Holles’s handwriting, is in Egerton MSS. ff. 136-149.