Art. 9.-THE FIRST LORD HOLLAND.

Henry Fox, First Lord Holland; His Family and Relations. By the Earl of Ilchester. 2 vols. Murray, 1920.

We have often had occasion to lament, when enjoying the hospitality of English country-houses, the indifference of country-gentlemen towards their books and, above all, to their papers. Men who are ideal landlords, admirable citizens in respect of the hard work that they do for the county, proud of their possessions, and well informed as to such things as their pictures and their china, are often strangely ignorant of the contents of their libraries, and regard their muniments and other papers as the affair of their agents. Let it be granted that a country-gentleman who knows all about all his possessions, his lands, woods, flocks, herds, house, and house's contents, is one of no ordinary culture. It is asking a good deal of a man to be a good judge of a bull and a good judge of a miniature, to be equally competent to conduct a drive of partridges and to read the courthand of an ancient deed, to be able to gauge the merits or demerits of a tenant as a cultivator, and to date the undated letter of an ancestor. Yet such men are to be found, and Lord Ilchester is one of them. There are not many who would care to match themselves against him with a gun or with a dry fly; there are few who could teach him anything about his pictures, his furniture, his china, or his books. Not only does he cherish his papers, from a deed which bears the marks of Canute and Dunstan to the letter of the last man of note who has visited Holland House, but he also interprets the more interesting of them by genuine and laborious research, and sets them forth, with an excellently written though modest commentary of his own, for the reader of English history.

It is not until one peruses a compendious list of the Cabinets of the English Sovereigns from George I to Victoria that one realises how recently they have ceased to consist mainly of peers. Yet the great English names of the political world in the 18th century-there are practically only three-were all of them owned by Vol. 233.-No. 463.

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commoners, Walpole, Pitt, and Fox. Walpole was a country-gentleman of old family, one of the ruling caste who considered the House of Commons to be their peculiar property; and he had therefore some right to be a Prime Minister. But the Pitts and Foxes were, in a manner, parvenus; and the Pitts in particular, in virtue of the Regent diamond which Robert Pitt brought home from India in the heel of his shoe, actually belonged to the odious tribe of nabobs. They were detestable folk in the eyes of the English country-gentlemen, those nobodies who had 'shaken the pagoda-tree' and come home with the spoils of India to buy rotten boroughs and attempt, in a small but offensive way, to vie with old families, whose servants or dependents had obediently returned their masters' nominees to Parliament for generations. Small wonder that the House of Commons persecuted with peculiar bitterness the only two great men among the nabobs, Clive and Warren Hastings. But meanwhile the two parvenu families had each of them secured an earldom for one of their members and a barony for another. The Pitts have vanished. Their barony of Camelford is recalled only by the duel which extinguished it; and the glories of the earldom were tarnished by the doggerel that connects the second Earl with the Walcheren Expedition. The Foxes are more fortunate. The barony of Holland will be remembered longest, probably, through the hospitality which made Holland House the resort of such men as Macaulay, and of a score of others who were famous in their time. The Earldom of Ilchester will, we think, deserve henceforth at least a modest niche in the temple of English letters.

The family of Fox can be traced back in Wiltshire and in Hallamshire to the middle of the 15th century. Stephen, the first of his name to make a mark on history, claimed no remote or exalted ancestry, but was content to style himself a wonderful child of Providence, born of virtuous parents, distinguished from their neighbours by their orderly and pious living.' He came, in fact, of honest yeoman stock, and was sincere and humble enough to give God and his parents the glory for his success in life. Entering the world in 1627, the sixth son in a family of eight sons and two daughters, he drifted into the circle of Charles I's Court at the age of thirteen, and,

after passing through the service of sundry great magnates, finally settled down in 1644 with Lord Percy, Master of the Horse to the Prince of Wales. With him he migrated to France in 1645, and was followed in the ensuing year by Prince Charles himself. Stephen was then entrusted with the care of the Prince's horses and stables, and later with the arrangements for all journeys and hunting expeditions. In fact, he, and not Lord Percy, did the work of Master of the Horse; and Prince Charles failed not to take note of it. After several troubled years, he was recalled in 1653 to Charles's now impoverished Court, and placed in supreme financial control with the title of Cofferer. He was very evidently endowed with great administrative gifts, and was trusted by all and sundry as only a man of the strictest integrity could have been. Though disappointed of high office in the Royal Household at the Restoration, he was none the less the mainstay of the royal credit, which without him could hardly have existed. Hence it was that he received the Paymastership of the Army, whose wages he advanced regularly, not indeed without remuneration—for business is business but without trespassing one inch beyond his legitimate rights. By sheer thrift and ability he amassed a fortune of some 200,000l., 'all honestly gotten and unenvied, which is next to a miracle,' says Evelyn. In the matter of the army, his name is generally associated with the stoppages of pay which defrayed to him the interest on the money which he had provided; and stoppages have no pleasant sound in the British soldier's ears. This is unjust and wrong. Stephen Fox is entitled rather to the name of the British soldier's best friend, for it was he who originated the scheme for the foundation of Chelsea Hospital, undertook the collection of the necessary funds, supervised the works, and lent thousands towards the final accomplishment of his project, refusing all interest since he was working in the cause of charity.

Sir Stephen (for he had received knighthood in 1665) resigned the office of Paymaster in 1680 in favour of his son; but he continued to enjoy lucrative offices in the household under James II and William III. Upon the accession of Queen Anne, having invested his money well in real property in Wilts and Somerset, he retired

into private life; and in 1703, after seven years of a widower's life, he married for the second time. Greatly to his surprise the arrival of a boy, Stephen, showed him that he had laid the foundation of a second family. The birth took place a month after the battle of Blenheim, in which his only surviving son by his first marriage had indirectly no small share. This son, as Paymaster of the Forces, had evidently realised that money is the sinews of war, for at the close of the campaign he received a flattering letter from the august Corporal John himself. 'Mr Fox'-so ran the great Duke's missive in the sprawling round text which we all know

'Mr Fox, if it had not been for your exactness never to have failed in furnishing the Army under my command with six weeks' pay beforehand, which I never wanted on the day it was due, I could not have gone to the Danube.'

Twelve months after the birth of young Stephen 'a greater wonder happened,' for twins were born to Sir Stephen, a son, Henry, and a daughter, Christian. Finally, in 1708, the year of Oudenarde, the old gentleman being then in his eighty-second year, Lady Fox presented him with yet another daughter. Not until 1716, three years after the Treaty of Utrecht, and two after the quiet establishment of the House of Brunswick on the throne, was Sir Stephen at length called to his rest, and buried in the church, which of his piety he had rebuilt, at Farley. He had been of the Court as a boy and had seen that Court dissolved, the country plunged into civil war, the Sovereign beheaded, and the Princes driven into exile. In that exile he had shared, and it must have brought him into contact, in 1646, with Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw, and Thomas Hobbes, all of them refugees at Paris in that year. He had witnessed the rise and death of Oliver Cromwell; he had seen his Prince restored, the succession of his brother James, the revolution which drove James across the sea, the accession of William and Mary, the great war with France which ended in 1697 with the peace of Ryswick, and the accession of Queen Anne. He must actually have been present at the coronations of every sovereign from Charles II to Anne. In his retirement he had watched from a distance the rise and fall of a

still greater soldier than Cromwell, John, Duke of Marlborough. As a boy he may have seen Ben Jonson; he may very likely have been nurtured on the poems, then just published, of George Herbert; and he may not have been unacquainted with those of yet another divine, the Reverend Robert Herrick. Yet Sir Stephen lived long enough to hear the fame of 'The Rape of the Lock,' and he may actually have seen Queen Anne touch a scrofulous child who bore the name of Samuel Johnson. Few men of long life have lived through greater times.

On the whole, we are inclined to rank this Sir Stephen as the greatest of the Foxes, certainly greater than his son Henry, while equal in intellect and superior in character to his grandson, Charles James. Lord Ilchester has happily reproduced for us a very fine portrait of his ancestor by Sir Peter Lely; and the face is that of a very handsome and highly bred man, sensitive, refined, straightforward, and resolute. One can never be sure that the hands painted by Vandyke and Lely really belonged to the bodies to which those artists have attached them; but, if Sir Stephen's hands were actually such as Sir Peter has represented them to be, they are well fitted to his countenance. We read without surprise that he took great interest in the fine arts, and employed not only Lely and Kneller to paint the family portraits but Verrio to paint the staircase of his new house at Chiswick. Moreover, we may be sure that Verrio received due payment for his work, which he did not from all of his patrons. Parts of the decoration of the house built by Fox at Redlynch in Somerset, which are now preserved at Melbury, show that Sir Stephen could be as sagacious in his choice of architects as of painters. Altogether he strikes us as a very remarkable man, presenting a rare combination of conspicuous administrative talent, fine artistic taste, spotless integrity, humbleness of heart, deep religious feeling, and wide and unfailing charity.

To turn from him to his son Henry, who is the hero of this volume, is somewhat of a shock to us. We follow Henry and his elder brother Stephen to Eton willingly enough, and we accompany them with joy upon their shooting expeditions. Of these they kept