Hollis's Hospital

The following information about Thomas Hollis (1720-1774) has been extracted with minor changes and additions from an article entitled ‘A bust of Thomas Hollis by Joseph Wilton RA: Sitter and artist revisited’, published by art historian Dr David Wilson FSA in the British Art Journal in 2004 (Vol. 5, no. 3, pages. 4-26) and is published here with Dr Wilson’s consent.

Thomas Hollis (1720 – 1774) was a fifth-generation descendant of a long line of deeply religious protestant non-conformists with strong Whig political principles, and inherited substantial fortunes on the death first of his father and then his grandfather. His ancestors had been successful cutlers in Rotherham. Hollis had believed that the British political system offered the best example among European models of government for fostering the defence of civil and religious liberty. That pre-eminence arose out of the struggles of the British Parliamentarians against the Crown in the seventeenth century and the final recognition that ultimate power resided not in the monarch but rather in the people through their elected representatives. Having returned to England in 1755 aged 35, after almost six years in Europe on the Grand Tour (often in the company of his life-long friend Thomas Brand) when he had observed “varying degrees of foreign despotism and misrule”, Hollis (then based mostly in London) resolved to devote his inexhaustible energy to a “plan” dedicated “to the private service of English liberty”. Hollis’s abhorrence at the corruption then inherent in the electoral system and his repulsion at the necessity for conformity led him to eschew a career in Parliament, a course usually available to an individual of wealth and refinement, but he determined to do privately everything in his power to promote civil and religious freedom. It was in the pursuit of his plan that Hollis’s relationship with the artistic world manifested itself. Hollis was also a man of charitable disposition, financially and in other ways supporting the Foundling Hospital, Guy’s Hospital, Lock’s Hospital, St. Thomas’s Hospital, The Asylum and the Magdalen Charity.

Although Hollis sought anonymity for his many literary, political and philanthropic activities, and largely managed not to draw public attention to himself during his life – which is one reason why his death was not marked by an outpouring of grief expressed in poetry – there is little doubt that he was a major influence on both the artistic and political scenes of his time.

In Hollis’s opinion the leadership of William Pitt the Elder (1708-1778) during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) epitomised the commercial, imperial and constitutional virtues of Whig liberty. Forced by opinion on George II “to save the nation”, Pitt, from a commercial background, led the House of Commons and organised the victories of 1759 over France which consolidated British sea power and brought territorial gains in India and Canada. During that period, Hollis extended his acts of charity to the Marine Society, the Troop Society and the Committee for the Relief of French Prisoners. Despite Britain’s success in that war and its triumphs over regimes Hollis disapproved, he was soon to observe Whig virtuosity decline as George III manifested the desire, following his accession in 1760, to re-assert his Royal authority after more than 50 years of Whig control of Parliament and government under the first two Hanoverian kings. In this policy, George was ably assisted by his favourite, John Stuart, third Earl of Bute (1713-1792), who became chief minister in 1761 and remained the major and “malign influence” on the King long after Bute ceased to be prime minister in 1763. George III’s desire to be perceived as peacemaker infused Bute’s challenge to the war effort which had been so ably managed by Pitt and led, in due course, to a peace treaty under which many perceived that the territorial gains and various conquests during the war had been squandered.

The zeal that Hollis henceforth applied to the execution of his plan was further increased by certain ‘tyrannical’ conduct of those who wielded the instruments of power in the name of the young King, such as the abuse of governmental authority evidenced by the suppression of civil liberty and the press in the Wilkes affair, and the growing mismanagement of the American colonies by the enactment of penal and coercive legislation. The former matter concerned the arrest for sedition of the politician and writer John Wilkes (1725-1797) for having attacked the King’s speech to Parliament in 1763 (written by Bute) praising the terms of the peace treaty with France, a treaty whose terms were scorned by many, including Hollis. As regards the American colonies, their mismanagement from London was typified by the Stamp Act, which sought to tax legal transactions of subjects who were themselves denied representation in Parliament and, as Professor William Bond observed, was to imbue Hollis with a “premonition of the American Revolution, a prospect that he laboured mightily to prevent and mercifully did not live to see”. On 11 February 1766, two months before the repeal of the Stamp Act (following a campaign supported by Pitt who had been out of office since 1761), Hollis recorded in his diary that the treatment of the colonists was “tending to the greatest extremities, unless prevented by healing measures immediately from home.” Hollis’s attempts to secure fairer treatment for the colonists from the British government, especially over the Stamp Act, meant that he was courted by the leading members of the American political élite including Jonathan Mayhew (a leading propagandist and one of the key formers of American revolutionary ideology), Andrew Elliot, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. These connections were greatly strengthened by Hollis’s private opposition to Archbishop Thomas Secker’s proposal to establish an episcopate in the New England colonies – Hollis sharing the view of his later biographer, Archdeacon Francis Blackburne, “that Episcopacy, as it is administered in our View, is a dead Weight upon Christian Piety”. Following the repeal of the Stamp Act, and as relations later deteriorated between the Motherland and the colonists, Hollis wrote in his diary for 3 June 1768 that, “unless there should prove that wisdom in Administration here at home, which I fear is not, the N. A. Colonies will break from us!” On 25 August 1768, he recorded his view that “the whole Equity lies on the side of the North Americans.” Hollis’s efforts on behalf of the colonists and his airing of their grievances on this side of the Atlantic led him to arrange the publication and distribution of a substantial number of radical texts by leading Americans, so that by 1770 “he had become…the busiest literary agent for American writers against the ‘usurpations’ of George III’s ministers.” These included John Adams’ famous Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law, “in which the past & present cases of the People of N. England & Liberty in general is considered.” (Hollis’s Diary, 21 November 1765)

Thus a “plan” which had commenced as a project to communicate Hollis’s belief in the superiority of the British system of government, gradually evolved, in the context of first of George III’s approbation of Bute’s activities, and then the deteriorating relations with the American colonies, into a “resolute assertion of Old Whig values as embodied in the ‘Glorious’ revolution of 1688.” Despite his opposition to Bute’s policies, Hollis remained loyal to the Crown. His aim (as he stated as late as 1767) was to do “all that can be done in favour of Liberty, and support of the House of Hanover”, Hollis regarding himself as “a friend to Liberty and King George”.

Hollis’s “plan” – whose elements of propaganda had strong literary and visual elements – included the publication and distribution of thousands of volumes of books, and medals and prints, to selected individuals and public institutions and libraries in Britain, the North American colonies and Europe. As far as the literary aspect of his plan was concerned, Hollis selected volumes germane to his objectives and included texts by writers such as Milton, Locke, Marvell and Sidney –seventeenth century British heroes who had suffered for their principles and who were enshrined within the Whig pantheon. Hollis’s role in life was “to attract public attention to such memorials and the proper political moral to be drawn from them”. The emblems were intended not only to call attention to a book but to convey Hollis’s views of the contents of that book, with some emblems, for example the seated owl, when inverted, denoting disapproval of the contents.

The execution of Hollis’s ‘plan’ through the production of medals commemorating Pitt’s triumphant war strategy was translated into one of the most publicised of all gardens, that at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, long associated with the politicisation of landscape design and by then a longstanding, ideological signifier of Whig policies associated with leading politicians, who were from the later 1750s leading the successful war effort. The designs for a series of medals depicting Britain’s victories in the Seven Years War, which had been promoted by Hollis, largely through the Society of Arts of which he was a member, had by 1763 been enlarged on behalf of one such politician into sculptural medallions for the interior of the Temple of Concord and Victory at Stowe.

In the design of his emblems, prints and medals, Hollis either employed or encouraged the employment of leading artists of the day in their respective fields.

During the 1760s, Hollis was a regular writer of articles in the St. James’ Chronicle and the London Chronicle reporting violations of civil rights and supporting liberty, contributions that were made under various pseudonyms. Hollis’s Diary records numerous occasions when he made gifts of money to the printers of these articles and other papers “for services to freedom”.

Hollis died suddenly while out walking on his estate in Dorset on the morning of 1 January 1774. He had given instructions that his body was to be buried in one of his fields, ten feet down, which should then be ploughed over with no stone to mark his final resting place. An obituary in the January edition of The Public Advertiser commented that:

“… formed on the severe but exalted plan of antient Greece; in whom was united the humane and disinterested virtue of Brutus, and the active and determined spirit of Sidney: illustrious in his manner of using an ample fortune, not by spending it in the parade of life, which he despised, but by assisting the deserving, and encouraging the Arts and Sciences…His humanity and generosity were not confined to the small spot of his own country; he sought for merit in every part of the globe, considering himself as a citizen of the world, but concealed his acts of munificence, being contented with the consciousness of having done well. Posterity will look up with great admiration to this great Man, who, like Milton, is not sufficiently known by this degenerate age in which he lived, tho’ it will have cause to lament the loss of him.”

While in Rome, in 1752, Hollis was painted in contemporary wig and clothing by Richard Wilson (1714-1782). That portrait is now in the Harvard University Portrait Collection. The name of Hollis had been associated with Harvard since the seventeenth century, owing to generous benefactions from Hollis’s great grandfather, and more importantly his great uncle, who not only provided gifts with a value then of over £5,000, but also established the Hollis professorships in Divinity and Natural Philosophy, the oldest chairs in America. The link with the Hollis name was to be immortalised as a result of the generous benefactions commencing in 1764 of Thomas Hollis following a disastrous fire at Harvard College in January of that year which destroyed almost the entire library. On learning the news in March of that year, Hollis set about rebuilding the collection and over the next decade he shipped to Harvard thousands of volumes on subjects as diverse as government, classical antiquity, medicine and agriculture, many of the volumes bearing his special emblems. Neither Hollis nor any of his forbears ever visited Harvard or America. “Their good works were founded on faith, reinforced by the reports of travellers, correspondents and agents in and from the new World.” Ironically, a few months after Hollis embarked on his project to re-stock the library at Harvard, a fire destroyed a large number of books which he had left with his bookbinder in London for binding prior to their shipment to America. In his diary for 6 June 1764, Hollis records: “I have lost by [the fire] a large and very fine collection of books, relating chiefly to Government, which were there for binding, and were intended to be sent to Harvard College in N. E., besides much time and thinking. I will not be discouraged, however, but begin collecting a finer parcel for that College…”

Hollis was physically conspicuous, described by a friend as

“over six feet tall, Herculean in size and strength, with a round face, low prominent forehead, bright brown eyes, high cheek bones, short nose, laughing mouth, and short neck, wide in the chest and shoulders. The rest of his body was similarly proportioned, and his knees and calves… were perfect in their beauty, their shape and curves, and in keeping with his Herculean character; with all this there wonderfully joined an incomparable manner of gentleness and sweetness.”

Bust of Thomas Hollis (1720-1774), circa 1758 – 66,
by Joseph Wilton RA (1722- 1803), National Portrait Gallery, London.

The fine white marble portrait bust of Thomas Hollis by the eminent sculptor Joseph Wilton RA (1722-1803), who was one of the founding members of the Royal Academy, is thought to have been modelled and carved around 1762, and has been the subject of numerous published references since 1786. It reflects with great subtlety Hollis’s powerful physique and the structure of his magnificent upper body, no doubt a recompense for his rigorous regime of exercise and physical pursuits. But Wilton’s sensitivity to his sitter’s character also reminds us that Hollis had a first class brain. The round face, prominent forehead, bright eyes, high cheekbones and short nose of Hollis, and his laughing mouth. all described by his friend, are in Wilton’s celebrated bust rendered with veracity and a total absence of generalisation, giving the head a freshness and naturalism, an almost painterly quality. Hollis’s bust by Wilton is displayed at the National Portrait Gallery, London, next to a portrait of John Wilkes, whose treatment by the government Hollis opposed and whose cause against the tyranny of government Hollis had championed.

Hollis left his estate to his friend, Thomas Brand, who afterwards changed his name to Brand-Hollis, and it was in the latter’s home, The Hyde at Ingatestone, Essex, that is found the first recorded reference to Wilton’s bust of Thomas Hollis. In his diary entry of 24 July, 1786, John Adams, at that time United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James and later Vice-President and President of the United States of America, recorded a visit to The Hyde (originally called ‘The Hide’). He noted that it was “the Residence of an Antiquarian”, all the rooms being decorated with large numbers of antiquities, many of which had been given, or bequeathed, by Hollis to Brand, and continued:

“I will perhaps take a list of all antiques in this Hall. The most interesting to me is the bust of my friend, as well as Mr Brand’s friend, the late Thomas Hollis Esq. …in beautiful white marble.”