HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS 



Lady Holland's offences most people, on learning the true facts 

 of the case, will allow that there were many excuses to be made 

 for her. 



She was the only child and heiress of Richard Vassall, owner 

 of an estate in Jamaica, which greatly decreased in value after 

 the abolition of the Slave trade in 1807. 



Her over-indulgent parents, of whom she speaks affectionately, 

 troubled her but little with education, and left her, she tells us, 

 to form her own conclusions in the matter of religion and morals. 

 They married her at fifteen to a " pompous coxcomb " (as she 

 frankly calls Sir Godfrey Webster, of Battle Abbey, near Hastings), 

 who was twenty years her senior, and quite unfitted to take charge 

 of the happiness of a bright, beautiful, but wayward girl. It 

 must be owned, however, that the patience of the mature husband 

 was sometimes severely tried ; for even in these early days Eliza- 

 beth betrayed much of the imperious temper that only increased 

 with advancing years, so that when, the lapses of her youth for- 

 gotten, she was an acknowledged leader in political society, Lady 

 Granville could write of her, when in 1825 Lady Holland once 

 visited her in Paris, as being " to me, of course, all smiles, but 

 rather more of a termagant than ever." 



Lord Ilchester, in the introduction to the " Journal," describes 

 an amusing feud that raged between the girl- wife and her husband's 

 aunt, who, as widow of the late baronet, had the right to reside at 

 the Abbey, until her death. She played various schoolgirl pranks 

 upon the dowager, and for some time sent across every morning to 

 the Abbey, to inquire whether " the old hag were still alive." 

 But let us not judge her over-harshly. Hers had been a marriage 

 of convenience ; wealth and beauty, in exchange for a title and 

 position, and somehow the girl seems to have felt herself unfairly 

 treated. She had to live in a small, dull, country house with one 

 who apparently made no effort to win the affections of the mere 

 child he had married. In her own words, " the union was perdition 

 to her ! " She was very unhappy, when she met in Florence in 

 1794, the only man she seems ever to have loved ; but the resolution 

 to renounce everything for the young Lord's sake was not quickly 

 made. She dreaded the scandal, and still more the inevitable 

 separation from her children. The surrender of the greater part 

 of her own large fortune to Sir Godfrey, does not appear to have 



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