The salon at Holland House, presided over by the formidable Lady Holland herself, is well known as a major institution in British political and cultural history. It is rightly regarded as at least as important as the rival salons of Dorothea Lieven and the Duchess of Dino. Anecdotes abound – for example, the occasion when Lady Holland sent a note to T. B. Macaulay asking him not to dominate the conversation. But the conversation then flagged and Lady Holland was forced to send another note to Macaulay which read ‘Please do dominate the conversation Mr. Macaulay.’ The salon was at its most influential in the 1820s and 1830s, with Lord and Lady Holland – Lord Holland was the nephew of Charles James Fox – seen as the guardians of the pure traditions of English Whiggery.

Perhaps the most important element in the Whig tradition was a belief in the importance of aristocracy, literally ‘the rule of the best’. The role of a properly enlightened aristocracy was to place strict limits on the powers of absolutist- inclined monarchs and to provide leadership to the rest of society to protect it from the allure of demagogues and extreme radicals. The institutional embodiment of these principles was, of course, a parliament, but a parliament consisting of two chambers with the upper chamber largely composed of hereditary peers. In some respects, Whiggery was an ideology rooted in the England of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Long years of exclusion from office, coupled with a recognition that significant social and economic change was occurring, added a new dimension to the strategy – a readiness to enrol the new middle classes as junior partners in a sort of progressive coalition. Above all, this found expression in the Reform Bill of 1832. Whigs believed in religious toleration and were often somewhat sceptical about conventional religious beliefs; many were Freemasons. Within fairly broad limits, they believed in a free press and the rule of law. Although not completely identical, Whigs might be regarded as the precursors of later Liberals.

But Holland House stood for something more; it had a significant international dimension. In short, Lord and Lady Holland wanted to promote the development of societies and political systems based upon their own principles elsewhere in the world.