Henry Vassall-Fox, 3rd Baron Holland

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry Richard Vassall-Fox, 3rd Baron Holland, inherited a barony before he could speak. In December 1774, at one year old, he became the 3rd Baron Holland after his father's early death. His mother died soon after, before his fifth birthday. An orphaned baron, raised among the storied Fox and Lennox families, would go on to sit in the House of Lords for decades. He would argue for ending the slave trade, then later accept payment tied to its abolition. He wrote memoirs full of Napoleonic-era gossip and one very strange short story. What did that inheritance cost him, and what did it demand of him later in life? And why does a corner of south London still carry his family's names? This is the story of Lord Holland, nephew of the famed orator Charles James Fox, whose public arguments and private interests did not always align.

• 2. A Family Of Whigs

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  Winterslow House in Wiltshire was where Henry Richard Vassall-Fox was born, on the 21st of November 1773. His father was Stephen Fox, 2nd Baron Holland, and his mother was Lady Mary FitzPatrick, daughter of John FitzPatrick, 1st Earl of Upper Ossory. Her own mother was Lady Evelyn, daughter of John Leveson-Gower, 1st Earl Gower. On his father's side, his grandparents were Henry Fox, 1st Baron Holland, and Lady Caroline Lennox, the eldest of the famous Lennox sisters. Lady Caroline was herself a great-granddaughter, through an illegitimate line, of King Charles II.

  Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, shaped the rest of his young life. There he became close friends with George Canning and John Hookham Frere. Throughout his career, his political loyalty to the Whigs never wavered. That loyalty would soon be tested far from Wiltshire, on the streets of revolutionary Paris.

• 3. A Seat In The Lords

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  On a visit to Paris in 1791, Holland became acquainted with Lafayette and Talleyrand. He took his seat in the House of Lords on the 5th of October 1796. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica later claimed that for a time he 'almost... constituted the Whig party in the upper house.' He also took on a diplomatic assignment, negotiating a treaty opposite the American envoys James Monroe and William Pinkney. The Privy Council admitted him on the 27th of August 1806. Weeks later, on the 15th of October, he entered Lord Grenville's Ministry of All the Talents as Lord Privy Seal. He held the post until the government fell, in March 1807.

  In 1811, Holland led the opposition to the Regency Bill in the House of Lords. He also attacked the government's orders in council, measures meant to counter Napoleon's Berlin Decrees. A treaty signed with Sweden in 1813 bound Britain to accept the forced union of Norway, and Holland denounced it. He resisted a bill in 1816 that would confine Napoleon to Saint Helena. From 1830 to 1834, and again from 1835 until his death, he served as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster under Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne. In February 1807, while still serving as Lord Privy Seal, he had risen to speak on a very different question, one about slavery that would echo across the rest of his life.

• 4. Bondage And Compensation

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  On the 5th of February 1807, during debate over the proposed Slave Trade Act, Holland rose in the House of Lords to support it. He argued that it was 'impossible to believe that the state of a negro in the West Indies was such as to lead him to prefer it even to slavery in Africa.' He added that enslaved people were, in his words, 'torn from his country and connections' by an unfamiliar kind of labor they had never known.

  In 1837, the Slave Compensation Act followed the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, and the government compensated former owners of enslaved people. Holland was compensated under three separate awards, for enslaved people on his estates in Jamaica. Those estates had come to him through his wife, Elizabeth Webster, whose maiden name was Vassall. In 1806, the same year, he had already published his first book, a study of the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega.

• 5. Ink Beyond Westminster

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  Dr Moylan of Lincoln's Inn collected Holland's protests against Tory ministers and published them in 1841 as Opinions of Lord Holland. Foreign Reminiscences followed in 1850, filled with gossip from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era. His Memoirs of the Whig Party, published in two volumes in 1852, stands as an important contemporary account of the period.

  In 1817, he expanded his focus in a two-volume work on the lives and writings of Lope de Vega and Guillen de Castro. His whimsical short story, Eve's Legend, uses only one vowel, the letter E, throughout its text. It is considered a precursor to the constraint-based writing later associated with the Oulipo school. None of these literary works mattered as much to his own identity as a name change: in 1800 he was authorised to add Vassall to his own.

• 6. A Marriage In Florence

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  At Florence, while traveling through Italy in 1793, Holland met Elizabeth Vassall, then known as Lady Webster, wife of Sir Godfrey Webster, 4th Baronet. She and Sir Godfrey later divorced, and on the 6th of July 1797 she married Holland, becoming Elizabeth Fox, Baroness Holland. An illegitimate son, Charles Richard Fox, was born to the couple, and he later rose to become a General in the British Army.

  Three more children survived infancy: Stephen Fox, who died in 1800; Henry Edward Fox, who became the 4th Baron Holland; and Mary Elizabeth Fox, who married Thomas Powys, 3rd Baron Lilford. After 1807, he signed himself Vassall Holland, though the name was never officially part of his title. Lord Holland died at 66 years old and was succeeded in his titles by his eldest and only surviving legitimate son, Henry. His widow, Lady Holland, died in November 1845. Long before any of this, in the 1820s, Holland had already begun turning some of that inherited land into London streets that still bear his family's name.

• 7. A Name On The Map

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  Vassall ward, in the London Borough of Lambeth, takes its name directly from Henry Richard Vassall-Fox. He was responsible for the area's first building development, carried out in the 1820s.

  Roads across the neighborhood still carry the family's names: Holland Grove, Lord Holland Lane, Foxley Square, and Vassall Road. Foxley Square remains one of the quieter corners of Lambeth still carrying the Vassall-Fox name, a small but lasting trace of the baron who developed the ground beneath it.