Viscount Castlereagh
Lord Castlereagh assembled the coalition that beat Napoleon and negotiated the peace that held for a century. Born in 1769 in Dublin, Robert Stewart came from an Ulster Presbyterian family raised to the Irish peerage, and entered the Irish parliament at twenty-one as a reformer. He moved sharply the other way after the French Revolution and, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, suppressed the rebellion of 1798 and then carried the Act of Union — by patronage, peerages and cash — on the understanding that Catholic emancipation would follow it, and resigned with Pitt when it did not. He was Secretary for War from 1807, backed Wellington in the Peninsula against a sceptical cabinet, and fought a duel with George Canning in 1809 after discovering Canning had been intriguing to have him removed. He wounded him in the thigh and both resigned. He returned as Foreign Secretary in 1812 and did the work that matters. He held together the fourth and sixth coalitions with British subsidies and, unusually, by going to the continent himself, and drafted the Treaty of Chaumont in 1814 binding the allies for twenty years. At Vienna he argued for a balance that would not humiliate France, and it is largely his settlement. At home he was the face of repression — the Six Acts, Peterloo — and Shelley wrote that he had a mask like Murder's. He cut his own throat in August 1822 during a paranoid breakdown, and the crowd cheered his coffin into the Abbey. Byron wrote an epitaph on him too crude to quote. The system he built at Vienna outlasted every reputation he had.
- Lived: 1769 CE – 1822 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: foreign_secretary, diplomat, statesman
