Enemies of the State by M. J. Trow

Whitehall’. One of his judgements in 1805 meant that certain schools were allowed to teach nothing but Latin and Greek. He and Sidmouth regarded themselves as the ‘last of the old school’ and as long as they dominated the Cabinet (Eldon was a favourite of both George III and George IV) these dinosaurs were unlikely to accept the sort of concessionary changes which would have made Cato Street unnecessary.
    As always, the private man was different. He was cheerful, he was kind, he liked his port (usually two bottles a day) and he did say in one memorable moment, ‘If I were to begin life again, damn my eyes but I would begin as an agitator.’ But Lord Eldon did not begin again as an agitator. He just hanged those who were.
    Of all the men who should have dined with Lord Harrowby, the one that most carried the scorn and contempt of the working class was the strikingly handsome Robert Stewart, Marquis of Londonderry, but always known by his earlier title of Viscount Castlereagh. Shelley’s cold and damning linestill hovers over the man’s reputation – ‘I met Murder in the way; he had a mask like Castlereagh.’ It was his head in particular that butcher James Ings wanted to hack off at Lord Harrowby’s and he carried his butcher’s knife for the purpose.
    Stewart was born of a Scottish-Irish family in County Donegal in 1769. A graduate of St John’s College, Cambridge, his Grand Tour enabled him to hear a debate in the Constituent Assembly in Paris. He sat in the Dublin parliament from 1790 and in the Westminster Commons from 1794 to 1797 as MP for the pocket borough of Orford. When the Dublin parliament was disbanded under the Act of Union, Castlereagh was one of the hundred MPs to join Westminster, representing County Down, and refused an English peerage which would have taken him to the Lords. 15
    His was the unenviable task of Chief Secretary for Ireland in the year of Wolfe Tone’s rebellion. The vicious handling of this rising was not Castlereagh’s decision; in fact he complained about it bitterly, but the Irishman’s memory is long and he was regarded in the provinces as little short of a monster. They conveniently forgot that he resigned in 1801 along with Pitt over George III’s refusal to accept emancipation for the Catholics.
    In July 1805 Castlereagh was made Secretary for War and the Colonies. With the exception of Pitt, now becoming increasingly ill, he was the only Cabinet minister in the Commons and this was to take its toll on the man’s health and sanity in the years ahead. Out of office during the ‘Ministry of All the Talents’ he was back under Portland in his old job and at a crucially testing time. His reorganization of the appallingly amateurish militia was sensible and creative. His personal choice of Sir John Moore to command the Light Infantry was brilliant and even the decision to land at Walcheren to destroy the French fleet was a perfectly good one. Unfortunately, Moore was killed at Corunna and the commanders on the ground at Walcheren dragged their feet, losing half their command in the process. Not everyone pointed the finger of blame at Castlereagh, but he felt responsible nonetheless.
    He bounced back quicker than Canning after the unfortunate business on Putney Heath and was at the Foreign Office before Perceval’s assassination. It is perhaps a little over the top to accept Geoffrey Treasure’s verdict that Castlereagh was ‘perhaps the greatest foreign minister that this country has ever had’. The diplomatic shenanigans thatwere the Congress of Vienna of 1814–15 and the subsequent congresses are beyond the scope of this book. Castlereagh, with his wide command of languages, his feel for European attitudes and his personal friendship with Prince Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, made him a natural for all this. But he was also secretive and a difficult man to love. Though he dismissed