dangerous intrigue with Courtin and Barillon, the French envoys, and Louis XIV.; he refused, however, the latter’s presents on the ground that he was a member of the council, having been appointed to Sir William Temple’s new modelled cabinet in 1679. Barillon described him as at this period in his old age “the man of all England for whom the different cabals have the most consideration,” and as firmly opposed to the arbitrary designs of the court. He showed moderation in the Popish Plot, and on the question of the exclusion followed Halifax rather than Shaftesbury. His long and eventful career closed by his death on the 17th of February 1680.
The character of Holles has been drawn by Burnet, with whom he was on terms of friendship. “Hollis was a man of great courage and of as great pride.... He was faithful and firm to his side and never changed through the whole course of his life.... He argued well but too vehemently; for he could not bear contradiction. He had the soul of an old stubborn Roman in him. He was a faithful but a rough friend, and a severe but fair enemy. He had a true sense of religion; and was a man of an unblameable course of life and of a sound judgment when it was not biased by passion.”[1] Holles was essentially an aristocrat and a Whig in feeling, making Cromwell’s supposed hatred of “Lords” a special charge against him; regarding the civil wars rather as a social than as a political revolution, and attributing all the evils of his time to the transference of political power from the governing families to the “meanest of men.” He was an authority on the history and practice of parliament and the constitution, and besides the pamphlets already mentioned was the author of The Case Stated concerning the Judicature of the House of Peers in the Point of Appeals (1675); The Case Stated of the Jurisdiction of the House of Lords in the point of Impositions (1676); Letter of a Gentleman to his Friend showing that the Bishops are not to be judges in Parliament in Cases Capital (1679); Lord Holles his Remains, being a 2nd letter to a Friend concerning the judicature of the Bishops in Parliament....[2] He also published A True Relation of the unjust accusation of certain French gentlemen (1671), an account of Holles’s intercession on their behalf and of his dispute with Lord Chief Justice Keeling; and he left Memoirs, written in exile in 1649, and dedicated “to the unparalleled Couple, Mr Oliver St John ... and Mr Oliver Cromwell....” published in 1699 and reprinted in Baron Maseres’s Select Tracts relating to the Civil Wars, i. 189. Several speeches of Holles were printed and are extant, and his Letter to Van Beuninghen has been already quoted.
Holles married (1) in 1628 Dorothy, daughter and heiress of Sir Francis Ashley; (2) in 1642 Jane, daughter and co-heiress of Sir John Shirley of Ifield in Sussex and widow of Sir Walter Covert of Slougham, Sussex; and (3) in 1666 Esther, daughter and co-heiress of Gideon Le Lou of Columbiers in Normandy, widow of James Richer. By his first wife he left one son, Francis, who succeeded him as 2nd baron. He had no children by his other wives, and the peerage became extinct in the person of his grandson Denzil, 3rd Baron Holles, in 1694, the estates devolving on John Holles (1662–1711), 4th earl of Clare and duke of Newcastle.
Holles’s brother, John Holles, 2nd earl of Clare (1595–1666), was member of parliament for East Retford in three parliaments before succeeding to the peerage in 1637. He took some part in the Civil War, but “he was very often of both parties, and never advantaged either.” The earldom of Clare, which had been granted in 1624 by James I. to his father, John Holles, in return for the payment of £5000, became merged in the dukedom of Newcastle in 1694, when John Holles, the 4th earl, was created duke of Newcastle.
Holles’s Life has been written by C. H. Firth in the Dictionary of National Biography; by Horace Walpole in Royal and Noble Authors, ii. 28; by Guizot in Monk’s Contemporaries (Eng. trans., 1851); and by A. Collins in Historical Collections of Noble Families (1752), and in the Biographia Britannica. See also S. R. Gardiner, History of England (1883–1884), and History of the Great Civil War (1893); Lord Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, edited by W. D. Macray; G. Burnet, History of His Own Time (1833); and B. Whitelock, Memorials (1732). (P. C. Y.)
HOLLOWAY, THOMAS (1800–1883), English patent-medicine
vendor and philanthropist, was born at Devonport, on the 22nd
of September 1800, of humble parents. Until his twenty-eighth
year he lived at Penzance, where he assisted his mother and
brother in the baker’s shop which his father, once a warrant
officer in a militia regiment, had left them at his death. On
coming to London he made the acquaintance of Felix Albinolo,
an Italian, from whom he obtained the idea for the ointment
which was to carry his name all over the world. The secret of
his enormous success in business was due almost entirely to
advertisement, in the efficacy of which he had great faith. He
soon added the sale of pills to that of the ointment, and began
to devote the larger part of his profits to advertising. Holloway’s
first newspaper announcement appeared on the 15th of October
1837, and in 1842 his yearly expenses for publicity had reached
the sum of £5000; this expenditure went on steadily increasing
as his sales increased, until it had reached the figure of £50,000
per annum at the time of his death. It is, however, chiefly
by the two princely foundations—the Sanatorium and the
College for Women at Egham (q.v.), endowed by Holloway
towards the close of his life—that his name will be perpetuated,
more than a million sterling having been set apart by him for the
erection and permanent endowment of these institutions. In
the deed of gift of the college the founder credited his wife, who
died in 1875, with the advice and counsel that led him to provide
what he hoped might ultimately become the nucleus of a university
for women. The philanthropic and somewhat eccentric
donor (he had an unconcealed prejudice against doctors, lawyers
and parsons) died of congestion of the lungs at Sunninghill on
the 26th of December 1883.
HOLLY (Ilex Aquifolium), the European representative of a large genus of trees and shrubs of the natural order Ilicineae, containing about 170 species. The genus finds its chief development in Central and South America; is well developed in Asia, especially the Chinese-Japanese area, and has but few species in Europe, Africa and Australia. In Europe, where I. Aquifolium is the sole surviving species, the genus was richly represented during the Miocene period by forms at first South American and Asiatic, and later North American in type (Schimper, Paléont. végét. iii. 204, 1874). The leaves are generally leathery and evergreen, and are alternate and stalked; the flowers are commonly dioecious, are in axillary cymes, fascicles or umbellules, and have a persistent four- to five-lobed calyx, a white, rotate four- or rarely five- or six-cleft corolla, with the four or five stamens adherent to its base in the male, sometimes hypogynous in the female flowers, and a two- to twelve-celled ovary; the fruit is a globose, very seldom ovoid, and usually red drupe, containing two to sixteen one-seeded stones.
The common holly, or Hulver (apparently the κήλαστρος of Theophrastus;[3] Ang.-Sax. holen or holegn; Mid. Eng. holyn or holin, whence holm and holmtree;[4] Welsh, celyn; Ger. Stechpalme, Hulse, Hulst; O. Fr. houx; and Fr. houlx),[5] I. Aquifolium, is an evergreen shrub or low tree, having smooth, ash-coloured bark, and wavy, pointed, smooth and glossy leaves, 2 to 3 in. long, with a spinous margin, raised and cartilaginous below, or, as commonly on the upper branches of the older trees, entire—a
- ↑ Burnet’s History of His Own Times, vi. 257, 268.
- ↑ The rough draft, apparently in Holles’s handwriting, is in Egerton MSS. ff. 136–149.
- ↑ Hist. Plant. i. 9. 3, iii. 3. 1, and 4. 6, et passim. On the aquifolium or aquifolia of Latin authors, commonly regarded as the holly, see A. de Grandsagne, Hist. Nat. de Pline, bk. xvi., “Notes,” pp. 199, 206.
- ↑ The term “holm,” as indicative of a prevalence of holly, is stated to have entered into the names of several places in Britain. From its superficial resemblance to the holly, the tree Quercus Ilex, the evergreen oak, received the appellation of “holm-oak.”
- ↑ Skeat (Etymolog. Dict., 1879) with reference to the word holly remarks: “The form of the base Kul (= Teutonic Hul) is probably connected with Lat. culmen, a peak, culmus, a stalk; perhaps because the leaves are ‘pointed.’” Grimm (Deut. Wörterb. Bd. iv.) suggests that the term Hulst, as the O.H.G. Hulis, applied to the butcher’s broom, or knee-holly, in the earliest times used for hedges, may have reference to the holly as a protecting (hüllender) plant.
