if a short holiday was given—less than a week say—Norfolk was too far off; and I was not permitted to spend it at Holkham. I generally went to Charles Fox’s at Addison Road, or to Holland House. Lord Holland was a great friend of my father’s; but, if Creevey is to be trusted—which, as a rule, my recollection of him would permit me to doubt, though perhaps not in this instance—Lord Holland did not go to Holkham because of my father’s dislike to Lady Holland.
I speak here of my introduction to Holland House, for although Lady Holland was then in the zenith of her ascendency, (it was she who was the Cabinet Minister, not her too amiable husband,) although Holland House was then the resort of all the potentates of Whig statecraft, and Whig literature, and Whig wit, in the persons of Lord Grey, Brougham, Jeffrey, Macaulay, Sydney Smith, and others, it was not till eight or ten years later that I knew, when I met them there, who and what her Ladyship’s brilliant satellites were. I shall not return to Lady Holland, so I will say a parting word of her forthwith.
The woman who corresponded with Buonaparte, and consoled the prisoner of St. Helena with black currant jam, was no ordinary personage. Most people, I fancy, were afraid of her. Her stature, her voice, her beard, were obtrusive marks of her masculine attributes. It is questionable whether her amity or her enmity was most to be dreaded. She liked those best whom she could most easily tyrannise over. Those in the other category might possibly keep aloof. For my part I feared her patronage. I remember when I was about seventeen—a self-conscious hobbledehoy—Mr. Ellice took me to one of her large receptions. She received her guests from a sort of elevated dais. When I came up—very shy—to make my salute, she asked me how old I was. ‘Seventeen,’ was the answer. ‘That means next birthday,’ she grunted. ‘Come and give me a kiss, my dear.’ I, a man!—a man whose voice was (sometimes) as gruff as hers!—a man who was beginning to shave for a moustache! Oh! the indignity of it!
But it was not Lady Holland, or her court, that concerned me in my school days, it was Holland Park, or the extensive grounds about Charles Fox’s house (there were no other houses at Addison Road then), that I loved to roam in. It was the birds’-nesting; it was the golden carp I used to fish for on the sly with a pin; the shying at the swans, the hunt for cockchafers, the freedom of mischief generally, and the excellent food—which I was so much in need of—that made the holiday delightful.
Some years later, when dining at Holland House, I happened to sit near the hostess. It was a large dinner party. Lord Holland, in his bath-chair (he nearly always had the gout), sat at the far end of the table a long way off. But my lady kept an eye on him, for she had caught him drinking champagne. She beckoned to the groom of the chambers, who stood behind her; and in a gruff and angry voice shouted: ‘Go to my Lord. Take away his wine, and tell him if he drinks any more you have my orders to wheel him into the next room.’ If this was a joke it was certainly a practical one. And yet affection was behind it. There’s a tender place in every heart.
Like all despots, she was subject to fits of cowardice—especially, it was said, with regard to a future state, which she professed to disbelieve in. Mr. Ellice told me that once, in some country house, while a fearful storm was raging, and the claps of thunder made the windows rattle, Lady Holland was so terrified that she changed dresses with her maid, and hid herself in the cellar. Whether the story be a calumny or not, it is at least characteristic.
After all, it was mainly due to her that Holland House became the focus of all that was brilliant in Europe. In the memoirs of her father—Sydney Smith—Mrs. Austin writes: ‘The world has rarely seen, and will rarely, if ever, see again all that was to be found within the walls of Holland House. Genius and merit, in whatever rank of life, became a passport there; and all that was choicest and rarest in Europe seemed attracted to that spot as their natural soil.’
Did we learn much at Temple Grove? Let others answer for themselves. Acquaintance with the classics was the staple of a liberal education in those times. Temple Grove was the atrium to Eton, and gerund-grinding was its raison d’être. Before I was nine years old I daresay I could repeat—parrot, that is—several hundreds of lines of the Æneid. This, and some elementary arithmetic, geography, and drawing, which last I took to kindly, were dearly paid for by many tears, and by temporarily impaired health. It was due to my pallid cheeks that I was removed. It was due to the following six months—summer months—of a happy life that my health was completely restored.
CHAPTER III
Mr. Edward Ellice, who constantly figures in the memoirs of the last century as ‘Bear Ellice’ (an outrageous misnomer, by the way), and who later on married my mother, was the chief controller of my youthful destiny. His first wife was a sister of the Lord Grey of Reform Bill fame, in whose Government he filled the office of War Minister. In many respects Mr. Ellice was a notable man. He possessed shrewd intelligence, much force of character, and an autocratic spirit—to which he owed his sobriquet. His kindness of heart, his powers of conversation, with striking personality and ample wealth, combined to make him popular. His house in Arlington Street, and his shooting lodge at Glen Quoich, were famous for the number of eminent men who were his frequent guests.
Mr. Ellice’s position as a minister, and his habitual residence in Paris, had brought him in touch with the leading statesmen of France. He was intimately acquainted with Louis Philippe, with Talleyrand, with Guizot, with Thiers, and most of the French men and French women whose names were bruited in the early part of the nineteenth century.
When I was taken from Temple Grove, I was placed, by the advice and arrangement of Mr. Ellice, under the charge of a French family, which had fallen into decay—through the change of dynasty. The Marquis de Coubrier had been Master of the Horse to Charles X. His widow—an old lady between seventy and eighty—with three maiden daughters, all advanced in years, lived upon the remnant of their estates in a small village called Larue, close to Bourg-la-Reine, which, it may be remembered, was occupied by the Prussians during the siege of Paris. There was a château, the former seat of the family; and, adjoining it, in the same grounds, a pretty and commodious cottage. The first was let as a country house to some wealthy Parisians; the cottage was occupied by the Marquise and her three daughters.
The personal appearances of each of these four elderly ladies, their distinct idiosyncrasies, and their former high position as members of a now moribund nobility, left a lasting impression on my memory. One might expect, perhaps, from such a prelude, to find in the old Marquise traces of stately demeanour, or a regretted superiority. Nothing of the kind. She herself was a short, square-built woman, with large head and strong features, framed in a mob cap, with a broad frill which flopped over her tortoise-shell spectacles. She wore a black bombazine gown, and list slippers. When in the garden, where she was always busy in the summer-time, she put on wooden sabots over her slippers.
Despite this homely exterior, she herself was a ‘lady’ in every sense of the word. Her manner was dignified and courteous to everyone. To her daughters and to myself she was gentle and affectionate. Her voice was sympathetic, almost musical. I never saw her temper ruffled. I never heard her allude to her antecedents.
The daughters were as unlike their mother as they were to one another. Adèle, the eldest, was very stout, with a profusion of grey ringlets. She spoke English fluently. I gathered, from her mysterious nods and tosses of the head, (to be sure, her head wagged a little of its own accord, the ringlets too, like lambs’ tails,) that she had had an affaire de cœur with an Englishman, and that the perfidious islander had removed from the Continent with her misplaced affections. She was a trifle bitter, I thought—for I applied her insinuations to myself—against Englishmen generally. But, though cynical in theory, she was perfectly amiable in practice. She superintended the ménage and spent the rest of her life in making paper flowers. I should hardly have known they were flowers, never having seen their prototypes in nature. She assured me, however, that they were beautiful copies—undoubtedly she believed them to be so.
Henriette, the youngest, had been the beauty of the family. This I had to take her own word for, since here again there was much room for imagination