Enemies of the State by M. J. Trow Page A

the ambitions of the Holy Alliance of European superpowers as ‘a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense’, it took him eight years to realize that British interests were not being considered by anyone else and had to leave it to his old nemesis Canning to do something about that.
    The average Englishman – and certainly the disgruntled labourer or would-be Jacobin – merely saw Shelley’s Castlereagh, the cold unfeeling supporter of reaction that could cheer the yeomanry’s bloody work at Manchester and frame the Six Acts to muzzle any attempts at reform. The problem was that, from 1812, Castlereagh was the sole Cabinet minister in the Commons, and therefore bore the brunt not only of awkward questions from the Whig opposition, but the uncertainty of some of his own party too. A strike by Glasgow weavers in March 1813; the opening of a Jesuit college in County Kildare in May 1814; Corn Law riots over the price of bread in London, March 1815 – all this and much more came Castlereagh’s way and he was supposed to provide answers. Actually, none of it was his responsibility at all. But James Ings wasn’t listening.
    The other men who should have dined in Grosvenor Square were small fry. Harrowby himself was Lord President of the Council and was elevated to the higher ranks of the peerage as an earl in 1809. Dudley Ryder had been Viscount Sandon and Baron Harrowby before that. His grandfather had been Lord Chief Justice on the King’s Bench in the 1750s and died the day after he had been offered a peerage by George II. The house on the south side of Grosvenor Square was merely the earl’s town house. He also owned considerable estates in the Midlands – it was at Sandon Hall near Stafford that William Davidson, Cato Street’s ‘man of colour’, worked for Harrowby on his furniture and fittings.
    Nicholas Vansittart was 54 at the time of Cato Street and has the distinction of being the longest serving Chancellor of the Exchequer in British history and one of the worst. The son of the governor of Bengal, Vansittart was born in Bloomsbury and educated at Christ Church, Oxford. Called to the Bar, he began his political career as a pamphleteer for Pitt andstood as MP for that most rotten of boroughs, the ‘accursed hill’ of Old Sarum, near Salisbury. He held a succession of posts under Pitt and Addington and was making a name for himself as a financier. He became Liverpool’s Chancellor of the Exchequer in May 1812 and embarked on a series of incredibly convoluted tax reforms to tackle the huge national debt brought about by the long years of war. He became very unpopular in the country at large and by 1820 his financial credibility had come under fire from William Huskisson in his own party, as well as the classical economist David Ricardo.
    Henry Bathurst was the son of a former Lord Chancellor. An MP from 1783, he inherited his father’s earldom eleven years later and was shunted rapidly through a range of government departments including the Treasury, the Admiralty, the Board of Control (India), the Board of Trade and the Foreign Office. Whereas the Australian Dictionary of Biography describes him as a ‘capable minister and a Tory of moderate opinions’, 16 it has to be asked how much in-depth experience he actually gained in any of those areas. As Colonial Secretary in 1820 he had little to do with internal events in this country, although he was concerned that transportation to Botany Bay (the fate of the more fortunate Cato Street conspirators) was not really working in any meaningful sense.
    Charles Grimble wrote:
    [Frederick] Robinson is an excellent Minister in days of calm and sunshine, but not endowed with either capacity or experience for these strange times.
    Historian George Thomson goes further: Robinson was a man ‘with a plump, dimpled face, pleasant manners, a vein of unconscious humour and not much else.’ 17 A