Holland House by Linda Kelly

Author:Linda Kelly [Kelly, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 19th-century history, social history, cultural history, political leaders, political leadership, political parties, liberalism, government, London
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2013-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Cut short before the qualifying final clause, the sentence implied that Alexander had been privy to his father’s death. It was a saying of the unsayable that caused a diplomatic uproar. Pozzo di Borgo, the Russian ambassador in Paris and an old friend of Holland’s, announced that he could no longer receive him or accept his invitations; Prince Lieven, the Russian ambassador in London, was said to be considering challenging him to a duel; Princess Lieven, till then a frequent visitor, cut off all further intercourse with Holland House. Lady Holland was beside herself; she had not slept since it happened, reported Creevey two days later. Holland did his best to smooth things over by publishing an anonymous explanation of the misunderstanding in the Times – ‘a peace offering to the Emperor of all the Russias, the Lievens ‌and the Princess of Madagascar’,6 as Creevey put it. But in private he was unrepentant. ‘Whether Alexander knew of Paul’s murder or not’, he wrote to Lord William Russell some months later,

I think he has done much worse things than that lately… Madame de Lieven who is a sensible woman and not a Russian [she was a Baltic German] knows very well that the Czar and his subjects when they mix with Europeans ne font que jouer la comédie and that even the anger of being accused of murder is but an affectation of sentiment to which they are [as] utterly strangers, as the religious horrors or devotion of Talma [the ‌actor] in Oedipe or Hippolytus.7

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