User:Scott/Drafts/Holland House set

The Holland House set was a noted group of Whig politicians and English intellectuals that flourished from 1797–1845 at Holland House in Kensington, London, the home of Henry Vassall-Fox, 3rd Baron Holland, and his wife, Elizabeth Vassall Fox, Lady Holland.

The noted diarist Charles Greville described the house as

Origin
Until he inherited a home in Bedfordshire from his uncle, John FitzPatrick, 2nd Earl of Upper Ossory, Holland possessed no country seat; a rarity for a man of his title. However, he possessed a dislike of life in the country, and after his marriage to Elizabeth in July 1797, she decided to provide him an alternative in the form of political and intellectual activities. This was to be the genesis of the set; two years later the first entries in their dinner books would appear.

Attendees
Until his death in 1806, Holland's uncle, Charles James Fox, formed an important part of the set, bringing with him Whig friends that included


 * the soldier and poet Richard FitzPatrick
 * the MP and minister Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne, nephew of Fox's brother Stephen, and son of Prime Minister William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne
 * the MP (and, like Fox, inveterate gambler) Lord Robert Spencer
 * the Scottish peer Lord John Townshend
 * James Maitland, 8th Earl of Lauderdale, one of the founders of Whig organisation the Society of the Friends of the People
 * the diplomat Sir Robert Adair

The poet and novelist Emily Eden noted in 1833 that "Lady Holland has certainly organised a good system of society — ten people every day at dinner, and a few in the evening, and there is always an author for the good of one's mind, and a doctor to prevent one's dropping down dead, and the rest are people who know each other well, and have the same politics."

Lady Holland's hypochondria was said to have accounted for the frequent appearance of doctors in the group. Relatively few women featured in the set as Lady Holland had a preference for male company. One of the few notable women to attend was Lady Caroline Lamb; however, the two fell out, and Lamb satirized her and Holland House in her novel Glenarvon as "the wife of the great Nabob; the Princess of Madagascar... [who] resides in an old-fashioned gothic building, called Barbary House, three miles beyond the turnpike", with "an outlandish set of menials" to whom she would "drop short epigrammatic sentences".

In an increasingly religious age, the set remained largely secular, with one attendee, John Allen, who lived at the house for forty years, earning the derisory nickname of "Lady Holland's Atheist". Even so,

Historians
Historians featured frequently in the set's meetings. While antiquaries such as Sir Francis Palgrave formed a part of the group, the most frequent variety of historian was those of politics. Lord Holland worked for some time on publishing the papers of his uncle, Charles James Fox; at the time of his death, Fox had been engaged in writing a history of the Whig party following the revolution of 1688. Holland died before he could complete the task, and John Allen took charge of the project. Whig historians were no strangers to Holland House; Henry Hallam visited often, and Sir James Mackintosh lived for long periods at the house while he was working on a history of England since the revolution. This task was taken over by Thomas Babington Macaulay, a younger member of the group, who eventually established the Whig view of history. Other historians that participated included George Grote and Philip Henry Stanhope, Lord Mahon, who was welcomed despite being politically conservative.

Politics of the continent
The Hollands, having spent some time living in France and Spain, had a strong interest in the politics of the continent, which was shared by their friends.