BIOGRAPHY: Castlereagh: From Enlightenment to Tyranny, by John Bew, Quercus, 722pp. £25
ONE SUMMER IN the early 1980s, Charles Haughey read a previous biography by Wendy Hinde and expressed some surprise that Lord Castlereagh regarded himself as Irish. One of the merits of John Bew’s biography of the statesman who, as British foreign secretary, was the leading light of Congress diplomacy at the end of the Napoleonic Wars is that it shows how the Irish thread ran through his whole career. Much of his life he represented the Co Down constituency in both the Irish and the British parliaments.
He found it easy to shift to an English constituency when the need arose. He preferred the larger Westminster stage but regularly visited home at Mount Stewart, on Strangford Lough, where his father, later the first marquess of Londonderry, who lived until 1821, was one of his warmest supporters.
The Stewarts were originally a Whig family, but Castlereagh, who witnessed the French Revolution in Paris in 1791, and mingled with emigres in Brussels in 1792, shifted his support to Pitt and moderate reform. At the end of 1796 he was in command of a militia sent to intercept the Bantry Bay expedition (which failed to land). His uncle Lord Camden had become lord lieutenant and needed a new chief secretary with good local knowledge. Castlereagh, still in his 20s, was appointed. Bew argues that he was never forgiven by the Whigs or patriots for crossing to the other side, even though the Russian ambassador’s wife, Princess Lieven, later remarked: “It is ridiculous to say that there are political parties in England. There are only men who wish to keep their places, and others who wish to occupy them.”
Castlereagh was associated with repression before and after the 1798 Rebellion, beginning with the execution of William Orr. Like Cornwallis, who succeeded Camden, he was not as sanguinary as loyalists would have wished, and, besides sparing neighbours Charles Teeling and Hamilton Rowan, backed the deal that allowed many leaders, in exchange for their lives, to give evidence to a secret parliamentary committee on the causes of the rebellion without having to implicate people.
He is more famous for securing the passage of the Act of Union by every means, which if the details had been revealed would have caused a major corruption scandal at the time. He was allowed to convey the prospect of Catholic Emancipation and was dismayed when George III harshly vetoed it, less than a month into the Union. His continued low-key support for emancipation may have prevented him becoming prime minister. His attitude was, what harm in introducing into parliament a few noble Catholic peers or gentlemen commoners, though post-1815 he wanted the reinstated pope to repress the growth of democracy among “the inferior clergy in Ireland”. Castlereagh’s closest ally, Wellington, was the prime minister who conceded emancipation too late, in 1829.
Castlereagh was born on Henry Street in Dublin in 1769, Wellington (as he was later known) on Upper Merrion Street. Both served in the Irish House of Commons in the 1790s. Castlereagh considered that one of his most important achievements was to prevail on a reluctant George III to give Wellington the peninsular command, when he was war secretary. He adopted Wellington’s motto: “I will not do what will please the people of England. I will endeavour to do what is good for them.” Wellington took over from him at the Congress of Vienna in January 1815, before returning to military command after Napoleon escaped from Elba. The battle of Waterloo, and the subsequent pacification of Europe in which both played a part, was the high point of British influence in Europe until 1914.
Moderation in victory, and Castlereagh’s attitude that “it is not our business to collect trophies, but to try . . . to bring back the world to peaceful habits” contrasts favourably with the Versailles Treaty after the first World War in 1919: centuries-old conflict with France came to an end.
Castlereagh developed good relations with Metternich and was skilful at managing Tsar Alexander I. His close confidants Lord Clanwilliam, his private secretary, and Edward Cooke, formerly of Dublin Castle and pro-Union pamphleteer, had Irish backgrounds. The constant diplomatic travel in wooden ships and over bad roads took a considerable toll. He had some difficulty resisting powerful state interventionism, both liberal and reactionary, in the affairs of smaller states striving for constitutional systems. He regarded the Holy Alliance between Russian, Prussian and Austrian autocrats, to which British opinion was hostile, as “this piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense”.
Castlereagh was also leader of the House of Commons, as his prime minister, Lord Liverpool, sat in the Lords. He regarded attention to the business of office as incompatible with dedicating his time “to the acquisition of popularity”. As postwar depression set in, he bore the brunt of opposition and radical attacks. His windows were regularly broken. The previous prime minister had been assassinated. Following the 1819 Peterloo massacre, which left 11 civilian demonstrators dead, the Cato Street conspiracy sought to wipe out the entire cabinet in February 1820. Castlereagh also had to manage a difficult and demanding new king, George IV, going through divorce proceedings, while Lady Castlereagh went to war with the royal mistress Lady Conyngham of Slane Castle. His diplomat brother, Charles, inquired if he could “devise a mode by which our Sovereign’s generous communications should not transpire beyond his closet”.
The strain became too much. Opponents Samuel Whitbread and Sir Samuel Romilly had cut their throats in 1815 and 1818. Bew provides explanations, not to be found in any school textbook, as to why in August 1822 Castlereagh cut his own throat.
Shortly beforehand, the bishop of Clogher had been found in flagrante delicto with a grenadier guardsman in the (still extant) White Hart inn on Holywell Street in St Albans. He was caught, by a small crowd, trying to escape with his breeches down.
According to the archbishop of Canterbury, “it was not safe for a bishop to show himself in the streets of London”. The incident preyed on Castlereagh’s mind, another clergyman claimed in 1855, because he had been blackmailed over an encounter in a brothel with a transvestite he had mistaken for a woman. Other possible explanations, such as terminal-stage syphilis, are given for his mental breakdown and paranoia.
John Bew acknowledges the support of a galaxy of latter-day pro-Union luminaries in his introduction. Unfortunately, no one pointed out that Galway is not at the mouth of the Shannon (page 105), that Emmet was arrested a month after his rebellion, not the morning after (page 195) and that there was no Prussian emperor, only a king, in 1812-13 (page 316). These are minor details in a biography well worth reading.
Dr Martin Mansergh, a former TD and Northern Ireland adviser, farms with his brother in the barony of Clanwilliam in Co Tipperary
