Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Holland, Henry Thurstan
HOLLAND, Sir HENRY THURSTAN, first Viscount Knutsford (1825–1914), belonged by descent to the family of Holland, derived, through the Hollands of Clifton and Mobberley, from the Hollands of Upholland. His ancestors owned various estates for many centuries in Lancashire and Cheshire. He was the elder son of Sir Henry Holland, first baronet [q.v.], a leading London physician, by his first wife, Margaret Emma, daughter of James Caldwell, of Linley Wood, Staffordshire, and was born at his father's house, 72 Brook Street, London, 3 August 1825. He was educated at Harrow, at Durham University, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1847. At Durham he won the Durham prize for Latin verse, and he steered the Cambridge boat in the university four-oared race of 1846. He was called to the bar by the Inner Temple in 1849, and practised on the Northern circuit. In 1850 he acted as secretary to the royal commission on common law, and assisted in drafting the Common Law Procedure Acts of 1852 and 1854. He was offered by Lord Campbell the county-court judgeship of Northumberland, but declined. In 1867 he was appointed by the fourth Earl of Carnarvon to be legal adviser at the Colonial Office, and gave up private practice. In 1870 he became assistant under-secretary for the Colonies. He held this office until August 1874, and then, having in 1873 succeeded to the baronetcy, resigned it in order to stand for parliament as conservative candidate for Midhurst. He was elected without a contest, and held the seat until 1885, when, under the Redistribution Act, Midhurst ceased to exist as a constituency. Sir Henry then stood for the newly created constituency of Hampstead, where he defeated the Marquess of Lorne. In the same year he became financial secretary to the Treasury in Lord Salisbury's administration, and soon afterwards vice-president of the Committee of Council on Education. He held the same office again in Lord Salisbury's second administration (1886–1888), and at the beginning of the latter year became secretary of state for the Colonies, and so head of the department in which he had served as a permanent official. He held that office until the fall of the conservative government in 1892. In 1887 took place, upon his initiative and under his presidency, the first of those colonial conferences out of which has since developed the quadrennial imperial conference. It was held in connexion with the gathering to celebrate Queen Victoria's first jubilee. Otherwise no events took place in this period which much disturbed the calm of the Colonial Office.
In 1888 Holland was raised to the peerage under the title of Baron Knutsford, of Knutsford, Cheshire, and in 1895 he was created a viscount. He was made a privy councillor in 1885; he was also a G.C.M.G. (1888), an ecclesiastical commissioner, a knight of justice of the order of St. John of Jerusalem, a bencher of the Inner Temple, and he served on several important royal commissions. He was noted for his good looks, social charm, and the energy which he put into any work that he had to do. He was not an orator, and confined his speeches in parliament to subjects with which he had, or had had, some official connexion. He had a country residence for nearly forty years at Witley in Surrey, and, when not in office, took due part in local affairs. He died at his London house in Eaton Square 29 January 1914, in his eighty-ninth year.
Lord Knutsford married twice: first, in 1852 Elizabeth Margaret (died 1855), daughter of Nathaniel Hibbert, of Munden House, Hertfordshire, and granddaughter of the famous Canon Sydney Smith; by her he had twin sons, one of whom, Sydney Holland, succeeded him as second Viscount, and a daughter; secondly, in 1858 Margaret Jean, daughter of Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan [q.v.], and niece of Lord Macaulay, by whom he had three sons and one daughter.
A portrait of Lord Knutsford by Sir Arthur Cope, R.A., painted in 1887, is now in the possession of Lord Hambleden. There is also a Grillion Club drawing.
[Burke's Peerage; Bernard Holland, The Lancashire Hollands, 1917; W. Ferguson Irvine, The Family of Holland of Mobberley and Knutsford, privately printed, 1912. Portrait, Royal Academy Pictures, 1907.]