John Bew’s biography of Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769-1822) – Castlereagh: the biography of a statesman – chief secretary for Ireland from 1796 to 1800, colonial secretary from 1802 to 1805, war secretary from 1806 to 1809 and foreign secretary from 1812 to 1822 – is a brilliantly researched and a conscious, compelling, if not always convincing, effort to restore the reputation of one of the most derided figures in British political history.
Hated by his fellow Irishmen for overseeing the brutal suppression of the United Irishmen rebellion of 1798, and, through bribery and coercion, pushing through the Act of Union, 1801, between Ireland and Britain, Castlereagh was equally loathed by British political radicals and reformers of the age – Jacobins, the nascent working class movement, opponents of the continuing wars with France – both the counterrevolutionary wars followed by the wars against Napoleon.
However, Bew – who is currently a policy adviser to Boris Johnson, overseeing a review into Britain’s role in the world post-Brexit – rejects the notion that Castlereagh was just an old fashioned Tory, an enemy of the enlightenment, and instead asserts his fellow Ulsterman was an ‘enlightened conservative’.
Castlereagh, Bew says:
‘…travelled widely in Europe, read a broad range of literature and eschewed the anti-Catholicism of many of his peers in England and Ireland. He was convinced that the only approach that government could take towards religion was one of toleration and that each man had the right to make his peace with God on his own terms. True, he was an enemy of political reform, but this was because of the dangers of mob politics which he saw first-hand in Paris during the French Revolution and Ireland during the rebellion of 1798.’
As a diplomat, Bew argues, Castleregh has as much right to be called a hero of the Napoleonic wars as Wellington and Nelson. Castlereagh was the statesman who put together the coalition that led to Napoleon’s defeat and then oversaw the creation of congress-diplomacy, through which the victorious powers arranged to keep the peace in Europe. It was as a proponent of realpolitik, Bew says, that Castlereagh has attracted the admiration of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and modern Conservative foreign secretaries, Douglas Hurd and William Haigh.
Of course, having Henry Kissinger as an admirer is more of an indictment than an endorsement – Christopher Hitchens has persuasively argued that Kissinger for his policies in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, East Timor, Cyprus, Chile, should have been charged as a war criminal; while the stinging assessments of Castlereagh’s contemporary foes, disgusted by the political repression at home that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre and the Cato Street conspiracy, still ring true.
For Byron, Castleregah was the Irish grim reaper, a ‘placid miscreant’ – a reference to Castlereagh’s notoriously calm, or to detractors, cold, demeanour – while to Shelley he was ‘Swellfoot the tyrant’ – a mocking reference to Castlereagh’s gout – or, in the Masque of Anarchy, written after Peterloo, the very face of murder.
I met Murder on the way
He had a mask like Castlereagh
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed the human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.
(Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy, 1819)
Cold-blooded, smooth-fac'd, placid miscreant!
Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin's gore,
And thus for wider carnage taught to pant,
Transferr'd to gorge upon a sister shore,
The vulgarest tool that Tyranny could want,
With just enough of talent, and no more,
To lengthen fetters by another fix'd,
And offer poison long already mix'd.
An orator of such set trash of phrase
Ineffably—legitimately vile,
That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise,
Nor foes—all nations—condescend to smile,
Not even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze
From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil,
That turns and turns to give the world a notion
Of endless torments and perpetual motion.
A bungler even in its disgusting trade,
And botching, patching, leaving still behind
Something of which its masters are afraid,
States to be curb'd, and thoughts to be confin'd,
Conspiracy or Congress to be made—
Cobbling at manacles for all mankind—
A tinkering slave-maker, who mends old chains,
With God and Man's abhorrence for its gains.
(Byron, dedication to Don Juan, 1819)