HOLLAND, HENRY RICHARD VASSAL FOX, LORD, was the only son of Stephen, second Lord Holland. Ilia mother was Mary, daughter of John Fitzpatrick, first Earl of Upper Osaory.
Sir Stephen Fox, Knight, distinguished for his magnificence and public spirit, as well as for his great wealth, having, in 1703, at the age of seventy-six, married a second wife, Christian, daughter of the Rev. Charles Hope of Newby in Lincolnshire, had by her, besides a daughter, two moos, Stephen and Henry, and died in 1715 at tho ago of eighty-nine. Stephen became Earl of Ilehester ; and Henry, who figures in our political history as the rival of the first Pitt, was, in 1763, raised to the peerage as Baron Holland, of Foxley, in the county of Wilts, his lady having the year before been made Baroness Holland, of Holland, in the county of Lincoln. Both baronies passed to their descendants. The eldest son of the first Lord Holland was Stephen, the second lord ; his second son was the Right Hon. Charles James Fox, the celebrated orator and statesman.
The subject of the present notice was born at Winterelow House, in Wilts, the 21st of November 1773. On the 9th of January 1774, that mansion, a splendid building, was destroyed by fire, and the infant was with difficulty saved from the flames by his mother. On the first of July the boy lost his grandfather, the first Lord Rolland ; on the 24th of the same month, his grandmother Lady Holland; and on the 26th of December in the same year, his father, the second Lord Holland; on which he succeeded to the peerage, when be was little more than a year old. His mother died in 1778, and then the care of the child'a education devolved on her brother, the Earl of Upper Ossory. After having been for some time at a school in the country, he was sent to Eton, where he spent eight or nine years, and where George Canning, Mr. Frero, the late Lord Carlisle, and other persons who subsequently rose to distinction, were among his contemporaries and associates. In October 1790 lie was entered as a nobleman at Christchurch, Oxford ; and took the honorary degree of master of arts, in right of his rank, in June 1792.
Before leaving the University he made his first visit to the Conti nent, in the course of which he saw Copenhagen, Paris, and a part of Switzerland. lie arrived in Franco not long after the death of
Mirabesu, and soon after the acceptance of the Constitution, by Louis XVI. after being brought back from Varennea, which was on the 13th of September 1791. In March1793 he went abroad a second time, and, France being now closed, directed his course to Spain, over a great part of which country he travailed, studying the language and literature, and making himself acquainted with the character and manners of the people. From Spain ho proceeded to Italy ; and there, at Florence, in the beginning of the year 1795, first met Lady Webster, the wife of Sir Godfrey Webster, with whom he returned to England in June 1796, and whom he married the next year, after she had been divorced from her first husband, who ohtaiucd 60004. damages in an action against Lord Holland. (Sco the particulars in the ' Annual Register' for 1797, pp. 10, 11.) After his marriage with Lady Webster, Lord Holland assumed, by sign manual, her family name of Vassal, which however has been laid aside by his children.
He now took his place in tho House of Lords. His first speech was made on the 9th of January 1798, on the motion for committing the bill for trebling the Rescued taxes. lie addressed the house both early in the debate, and again at the clue, in what is described as having been a very animated and successful reply to Lord Grenville, who, while he complimented the young peer on the ability with which he had spoken, had noticed some of his remarks in a way that was considered to be personal. On the division, nevertheless, Lord Holland found himself one of a minority of six against seventy-three ; so that he had early and emphatic experience of the position in which ho was to pass the greater part of his political life. He began also on this occasion a system which ho probably carried to a greater extent, than any other peer ever did, by entering a long protest against the bill on the Journals of the House. This first of Lord Holland's long series of protests, many of them very able papers, was signed only by himself and Lord Oxford.