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 
211 14* 
