Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh

Irish politician

• Born: June 18, 1769
• Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
• Died: August 12, 1822
• Place of death: Cray Farm, North Cray, Kent, England

Castlereagh’s political skills helped create the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland that created the United Kingdom. His role in the peace negotiations following the Napoleonic Wars helped ensure a just and long-lasting peace.

Early Life

Viscount Castlereagh (KAHS-ahl-ray) was born Robert Stewart in his grandfather’s house in Dublin. His mother, Lady Frances Seymour-Conway, was the daughter of the earl of Hertford, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1765. She died in 1770. His father, Robert Stewart, came from a landed Presbyterian Ulster family. The little boy’s elder brother died the year he was born. He was the only surviving son of his father’s first marriage. Baptized a Presbyterian, Stewart was brought up as an Anglican so as to avoid any obstacles to a political career. At the time, not only Roman Catholics but also non-Anglican Protestants lacked first-class citizenship.

Until he was eight years old, Stewart lived with his paternal grandparents. Then he attended the Royal School at Armagh, from which an early letter (October 6, 1777) assured his family that he was still a loyal “American,” by which he meant a supporter of the American revolutionaries, as both his father’s and his stepmother’s families were. He then joined his father’s household at Mount Stewart, County Down, and transferred to a nearby school. His father’s second wife was the daughter of the British Lord Chancellor Camden, a formidable figure in English Whig circles, who took a great interest in his step-grandson’s future. Camden persuaded Stewart’s father to send him to Cambridge, and he duly matriculated at St. John’s College in 1786. Until then, he had taken pleasure in the usual pursuits of the gentry—riding, sailing, dancing—and had shown no particular academic aptitude. At Cambridge, he was not impressed by the intellectual life and never took his degree.

Meanwhile, with the general election of 1790 looming, Stewart’s father was determined to reassert the family’s political influence in Down and to avenge his own electoral defeat in 1784 by putting up his son for a county seat in the Irish House of Commons. At enormous expense (some said sixty thousand pounds), Stewart was successful. He had not been quite twenty-one when he declared his candidacy, standing as an Independent Reformer. His father had accepted an Irish peerage so that both father and son would attend the new Irish Parliament, one as peer, the other as a member of Parliament (M.P.).

Three points about Stewart’s next few years are especially important. First, he went abroad, to Spa in 1791 and to Brussels in 1792. His acumen in assessing the impact of the French Revolution was quickly apparent. He told the refugees at Spa that there was no hope of restoring the France of 1789; at the same time, he foretold the collapse of the revolutionary paper currency, the assignats. Stewart’s departure from the Whig principles of Charles James Fox dates from this time, as does Lord Camden’s advice to him before his maiden speech in the Dublin Parliament. Camden explained that although his family tradition and election platform opposed the unreformed character of the Irish executive, which was responsible to the British cabinet, Stewart could all the same indicate his sympathy with William Pitt the Younger, prime minister in Great Britain. He could and did.

Second, in 1794, the tall, slim, and handsome M.P. married Lady Amelia (Emily) Hobart, daughter and only child of the earl of Buckinghamshire’s second marriage. This match reinforced the aristocratic English connections already begun with his mother’s family and continued with his stepmother’s. Third, he combined the tenure of his seat in the Irish House of Commons with election to a seat in the House of Commons of Great Britain. He first sat for Tregony, Cornwall, and later for Orford, Suffolk, until, in 1797, his acceptance of office in Ireland obliged him to give up any British seat. When he returned to Westminster it would be as M.P. in that new entity, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which he did so much to create.

By this time, Stewart’s admiration for Pitt and distrust of the French Revolution cut him off from his earliest political supporters in Ireland, many of whom continued to support the French Revolution and to hope that war between England and France would force England to make further concessions to Ireland, as had happened during the American Revolutionary War. Stewart, however (now Viscount Castlereagh), had already voted with Pitt to suspend habeas corpus in England. While shuttling between Dublin and Westminster, he supported the measures to limit civil liberties in both countries. He had moved away from his early Irish Whig reform principles and joined the Pittite supporters of an act of union, amalgamating the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland.

Life’s Work

Castlereagh’s appointment as Keeper of the Privy Seal in Ireland obliged him to resign his seat in the British Parliament, and at that time, 1797, he was reelected for his Irish seat at County Down. Already, Castlereagh had played a role as officer in the yeomanry, distinct from Pitt’s militia, which had been raised as an alternative to the suspect Irish Volunteers.

Informers betrayed the leadership of the United Irishmen, which had begun to link Ulster Presbyterians with southern Roman Catholics in a revolutionary organization, and Castlereagh participated in a preemptive strike at its leadership in Ulster in 1797. This success undoubtedly limited the scale of the Ulster rebellion in 1798. By that time, Castlereagh had become acting chief secretary of Ireland, during the illness and absence of Thomas Pelham (Lord Pelham and later second Earl of Chichester). He was the right-hand man of the Lord Lieutenant, chief resident executive of Ireland. His calm resourcefulness during the rebellion recommended him to the new Lord Lieutenant, Lord Cornwallis, who arrived after the suppression of the rebellion in the south at the Battle of Vinegar Hill, June 21, 1798. Cornwallis strongly supported Castlereagh as permanent replacement to Pelham as chief secretary in November, 1798.

Meanwhile, the last French effort to intervene failed. In 1796, General Hoche had been unable to make a landing at Bantry Bay. Another force under General Humbert, ill-coordinated with the local Irish rebellion, landed in August and surrendered in September, 1798. Had Napoleon Bonaparte sailed for Ireland rather than for Egypt, the outcome might have been different. As it was, Castlereagh’s problem was one of conciliation. He embraced Cornwallis’s amnesty for past rebels, though it infuriated ardent Protestant members of Orange Societies, thirsting for revenge. Castlereagh began serious correspondence with Pitt about a union of Ireland with Great Britain as a long-term solution to the problem of the relations of the two kingdoms.

Castlereagh had no confidence in a policy of concessions to Roman Catholics in the narrow context of a quasi-autonomous Ireland. The religious problem could be addressed only after Ireland merged with the larger entity of a single united kingdom. For almost two years (1799-1800), Castlereagh devoted himself to the job of persuading the Irish Parliament to abolish itself and to accept representation by one hundred M.P.’s at a new House of Commons at Westminster. These means of persuasion harked back to those used at the unification of Scotland with England in 1707: bribery, compensation for the loss of “property” in control over boroughs, new peerages, and promotions within the peerage. The idea that a borough “owner” was entitled to monetary compensation was current. Pitt had used it in his own abortive plan to reform the British House of Commons. Castlereagh’s task was to distribute some one and a quarter million pounds so as to guarantee majority votes in the Irish Parliament. Because most of the borough “owners” were Irish peers, they received most of the money.

Just as the whole Scottish peerage was not absorbed into the House of Lords of Great Britain, so the Irish peerage was to elect twenty-eight of its number to join the House of Lords of the United Kingdom. However, Scottish peers were elected at every general election; the Irish representative peers were to be elected for life. Therefore, Irish peers not elected as representative peers were to be eligible for election to the new House of Commons. Castlereagh was not affected, as his courtesy title left him eligible anyway. He did not succeed his father as an Irish peer until 1821 (by then the title had become Marquis of Londonderry). Others, such as Viscount Palmerston, were to find an Irish peerage compatible with not being an elected Irish representative peer.

The Act of Union with Ireland went into effect January 1, 1801, and by the time Castlereagh attended the new House of Commons, he had resigned as chief secretary. George III obstinately refused to accept ending the barriers to Roman Catholics being elected to the House of Commons and to their holding office. No precise pledge had been made by Pitt or Castlereagh, but Pitt’s cabinet had been favorable and Castlereagh hopeful.

Castlereagh hoped that with political union accomplished, the Roman Catholics would receive not only equal civil rights but also relief from tithes paid to support the Anglican Church in Ireland. He hoped that the state would increase funds for the education of both Roman Catholic and non-Anglican Protestant clergy in Ireland. None of these measures passed in his lifetime. The immediate result of the royal opposition was the resignation of Pitt with many cabinet colleagues and the departure of both Cornwallis and Castlereagh from their Irish posts. On arriving at Westminster, Castlereagh sat near Pitt on the government back benches, while Henry Addington succeeded Pitt as prime minister. Castlereagh believed that if Pitt had not been so tired and ill he might have dealt with the king more effectively.

Castlereagh had no intention of joining the opposition, however, and in fact accepted office as president of the Board of Control (India) under Addington in 1802. He had to mediate between East India Company directors in London and the governor-general in India, which required tactful management of prickly personalities. When Pitt returned as prime minister, he kept Castlereagh as president and made him secretary for war in July, 1805. Though Castlereagh lost both offices the next year, after Pitt’s death, he alone of the cabinet had sat with Pitt in the House of Commons, sharing with him the negotiations with Czar Alexander I in 1805, the basis for Castlereagh’s own foreign policy in 1815.

Back at the War Office in 1807, Castlereagh improved the recruitment procedure and developed the militia for home defense. The disastrous military failure at Walcheren led him to resign in 1809. Rivalry with George Canning preceded his resignation. Castlereagh challenged Canning, and their duel was fought September 21, 1809. On the second firing, he wounded Canning. Contemporaries thought the duel unnecessary as well as undesirable. Certainly it revealed the emotions churning behind Castlereagh’s mask of cold indifference to public opinion. His view was that Canning’s intrigues to oust him from office justified the duel and his insistence on a second shot. Castlereagh returned to office as foreign secretary in 1812 and, when Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was assassinated on May 11, 1812, as leader of the House of Commons under the premiership of Lord Liverpool. He held both positions until his death ten years later.

Castlereagh now revealed on a grander scale the qualities already exhibited as chief secretary in Ireland. Industry, method, and application won a greater acceptance if not acclaim. Castlereagh never equaled Pitt’s Biscayan roll in oratory or Canning’s memorable eloquence. Similarly, his French, while fluent, was so far from idiomatic as to reduce sophisticates such as the Princess Lieven to fits of laughter. The House of Commons listened to him carefully for his substance, not his style.

As Pitt’s heir, Castlereagh promoted allied unity first of all. If he made little headway in 1813, he was eventually successful with the Treaty of Chaumont, March 9, 1814, which not only bound the allies to continue the war against Napoleon but also committed them to work together for twenty years afterward to secure the peace. Pitt’s blueprint for postwar Europe had included an enlarged Netherlands, backed by Prussia, and an enlarged Piedmont, backed by Austria. The czar had agreed with Pitt that the war was against Napoleon, not against the French people. Therefore, a generous peace was most likely to stabilize postwar France. In 1805, neither Pitt nor Alexander I was committed to a restoration of the Bourbons, but both wished to establish something like a concert of Europe to avert future wars.

Castlereagh achieved most of the British objectives in the first Peace of Paris, May 30, 1814. France was left with its 1792 borders and no indemnity. Castlereagh was criticized for allowing France a five-year delay in abolishing the slave trade, though this was certainly congruent with the basic policy of a lenient peace, to assist the restored Bourbon monarchy as arranged by Talleyrand. At the Congress of Vienna, Castlereagh’s most daring initiative came when he organized a secret alliance of Austria, France, and England against Prussian demands.

There was little that Castlereagh could do about the Russian occupation of Poland, but the Prussians were forced to back down and accept a compromise over Saxony. Napoleon’s return, ousting Louis XVIII from his throne, brought a new crisis. Again, Castlereagh was calm and persevering. He defeated those in Parliament who were ready to patch up a peace with Napoleon and, after Waterloo, outmaneuvered those who were now determined to have a punitive peace.

France was reduced to the frontiers of 1790 and had to pay an indemnity and accept an occupation force. The Bourbons were restored, however, and Wellington supported Castlereagh for this comparatively lenient peace. Castlereagh’s crowning diplomatic achievement was winning parliamentary support for the Quadruple Alliance, accepted in England as of February 20, 1816. The agreement bound the allies to maintain the peace and to meet together periodically: the concert of Europe, or congress system, idea.

The first of the congresses, held at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, saw the completion of arrangements for payment of the indemnity, an end to the occupation, and the acceptance of France as a peacekeeping partner in what now became the Quintuple Alliance. Thereafter, difficulties posed by revolutions in Spain and Italy made Castlereagh more reluctant than Prince Metternich to support a policy of military intervention. At Troppau in 1820, the English sent only an observer, and they did the same at Laibach in 1821. Castlereagh was drawing a distinction between deterring aggressors bent on destroying the international balance of power worked out in 1815 and intervening in the internal politics of states, as Metternich and the czar were more inclined to do. Castlereagh met Metternich for the last time in October, 1821, in Hanover. They understood that their main objective, peace, was the same, even if their tactics differed.

At home, Castlereagh suffered great unpopularity for the repressive measures that he was responsible for steering through the House of Commons. It is fair to say that, like his mentor Pitt, he continued to support repression long after the evidence of clear and present danger had passed away. It is curious that he was singled out far more than his colleagues Lord Liverpool and Lord Sidmouth (as Addington had become) for the ferocious attacks by critics. Perhaps he drew more fire because he was so visible as Leader of the House, perhaps because his lofty disdain enraged more opponents.

By 1822, Castlereagh’s labors had worn him out. Observers feared for his sanity after the end of the parliamentary session. Wellington insisted that his doctor accompany him to his country retreat in Kent. There, on August 12, 1822, he committed suicide by cutting his throat. He was certainly deranged. It is less clear that his principal delusion was fear of blackmail for a homosexual offense in which he had been entrapped. Wellington dismissed this as sheer delusion. Psychohistorians might ask why that particular delusion. His widow insisted on burial in Westminster Abbey, and the hostile mob followed him there, jeering and hooting. Some obituaries were outright jubilant. Nevertheless, a dispassionate assessment would award Castlereagh high marks both for his farsighted views respecting the conciliation of Roman Catholics in Ireland and for his enlightened commitment to European peace through periodic conferences.

Significance

There seems little doubt that without the blocking of Roman Catholic emancipation by the Crown, the history of the United Kingdom would have been happier; it is at least possible that the Irish problem in the form confronting Sir Robert Peel and later William Ewart Gladstone might have vanished. Viscount Castlereagh’s vision at least offered that possibility. In foreign affairs, Castlereagh could not have hoped to hold the line precisely where he had drawn it in 1820, even if he had lived.

Castlereagh’s death certainly accelerated the collapse of his policy as Metternich turned to reliance on Russia, and Canning, Castlereagh’s successor, abandoned the commitment to Europe. Most contemporary English criticism was shortsighted or simply unfair. For example, Castlereagh never had anything to do with the “Holy Alliance,” that strange vision of Czar Alexander. Castlereagh’s vision of some means to anticipate and deter the menace of future Napoleons long survived the details of his diplomacy. Not surprisingly, in 1919, when another great peace conference was to be held, the Foreign Office went back to the records of Castlereagh’s peacemaking to guide the English delegation at Versailles.

Bibliography

Bartlett, Christopher J. Castlereagh. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966. The author discounts the blackmail delusion as the proximate cause for Castlereagh’s suicide. Contains a good bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Castlereagh, 1812-1822.” In The Makers of British Policy: From Pitt to Thatcher, edited by T. G. Otte. New York: Palgrave, 2002. This essay about Castlereagh is included in a book about prominent British statesmen from the Glorious Revolution to 1991.

Hyde, H. Montgomery. The Rise of Lord Castlereagh. London: Macmillan, 1933. This is the fullest treatment of the early years. Hyde rejects the blackmail story out of hand.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Strange Death of Lord Castlereagh. London: Heinemann, 1959. Here Hyde reverses himself completely concerning the suicide without giving any cogent reasons for the reversal.

Leigh, Ione. Castlereagh. London: Collins, 1951. Until Bartlett’s study (see above) this was the best short biography, and it is better organized.

Nicholson, Harold. The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity, 1812-1822. New York: Grove Press, 2000. A reprint of the classic book originally published in 1947. Nicholson provides a comprehensive narrative of the negotiations at the Congress and the power struggle among Castlereagh and other participants.

Webster, Charles K. The Congress of Vienna. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1945. This is a reprint of the London Foreign Office booklet printed in 1919 and used by the British delegates at Versailles.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, 1812-1815. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1931. The first volume of a magisterial study that, while not uncritical, rescues Castlereagh from the more ridiculous charges made against him.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, 1815-1822. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1947. Sequel to the preceding volume.