For Honour's Sake (18 page)

Liverpool asked Castlereagh to return as foreign secretary and to assume the duty of house leader. He also sought to include George Canning despite the bad blood that lingered between Castlereagh and this veteran Tory. In the late summer of 1809 the two had respectively held the posts of secretary for war and the colonies and foreign secretary in the Duke of Portland's government. With the duke on his deathbed, Canning had been at the centre of a web of cabinet ministers conspiring to eject Castlereagh from cabinet in such a public manner that it would necessarily besmirch his honour. Learning of the plot in mid-September, Castlereagh resigned. Then, on September 19, he wrote a three-page letter that set out with cold precision his understanding of Canning's hand in the matter. That Canning had every right to seek his dismissal, Castlereagh acknowledged, but he asserted that this should not have been pursued “at the expense of my honour and reputation.”
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Given the manner in which Canning had proceeded, Castlereagh wrote, “I must require that satisfaction from you to which I feel entitled to lay claim.” When Canning opened the letter the following evening, he declared, “I had rather fight than read it, by God.” He quickly dashed off a response. “The tone and purport of your Lordship's letter (which I have this moment received) of course precludes any other answer, on my part, to the misapprehensions and misrepresentations, with which it abounds, than that I will cheerfully give to your Lordship the satisfaction that you require.”
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The two met at six on the morning of September 21 at Lord Yarmouth's cottage on Putney Heath. En route Castlereagh had calmly talked with Yarmouth, who was acting as his second, about Catalinia, a currently fashionable opera singer, and hummed several bits of an aria she had popularized. As their carriage crossed over a bridge to gain the cottage, the river below had looked grey and murky, the water matching the sky overhead. Although Castlereagh had not fired a pistol since leaving Ireland to enter the British House of Commons, he had always been a good shot. Canning, however, had never before fired one. Standing several paces apart
and sideways to each other, the two men exchanged a first round in which both missed their target. Castlereagh said he remained unsatisfied as Canning had not yet apologized. The guns were reloaded. Canning fired and the ball nicked a button free from Castlereagh's coat. Aiming deliberately, Castlereagh shot his opponent in the leg. The seconds rushed to where Canning had collapsed in a huddle to the ground. The wound proved nasty but not life-threatening.

“We each fired two pistols,” Castlereagh wrote his father, “my second shot took effect, but happily only passed through the fleshy part of his thigh. Mr. Canning's conduct was very proper on the ground.”
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That two cabinet ministers would duel caused a great stir in the British press, and Canning was forced to follow up Castlereagh's resignation with his own. For Castlereagh the exile from cabinet lasted two and a half years, until he returned in March 1812 as Perceval's foreign secretary.

Liverpool had always walked a fine line between these two men, seeking the friendship of each and to moderate their sharp differences because he admired and respected both. Summoned to a meeting, both acknowledged the other with formal politeness. Castlereagh, knowing how much Liverpool wanted Canning, offered to relinquish the post of foreign secretary but retain management of the House of Commons. Canning said he wanted both positions, as he could not in conscience serve under Castlereagh in the House. Downcast, Liverpool refused to dismiss Castlereagh and the meeting broke up. Castlereagh retained the two positions Liverpool had originally assigned him.

Canning remained a sharp critic speaking from the Tory backbenches. If Liverpool resented this, he typically gave no sign. His was a moderate, always reasonable, self-effacing character. The many years spent at the forefront of the nation's public service had taken their toll on the once lanky young man. One observer noted that “the cares of office stamped their marks upon his face, but though his expression had hardened, his broad brow and thoughtful gaze showed his calm and even character.”
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Another considered Liverpool “kind by temperament,” possessing “an instinctive tact in dealing with others. His conciliatory manner smoothed away innumerable personal difficulties. He was a man whom it was almost impossible to dislike.”
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Despite his having held nearly every senior cabinet post and demonstrated ability and efficiency in them all, even Liverpool's friends did not believe him marked with “genius or even brilliance.”
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Wellington wrote from Iberia, “You have undertaken a most gigantic task and I don't know how you will get through it.”
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The Tories were desperately short of talent sufficient to build a solid government and could easily fall to a non-confidence motion if the Whigs and independents voted together. Liverpool drew in a few old Tories, including the 3rd Earl of Bathurst, Henry Bathurst, who became secretary for war and the colonies. But with Canning and other veterans remaining on the sidelines, Liverpool was forced to rely on junior colleagues. With his usual careful consideration, he chose them well. Lord Palmerston, Robert Peel, and Frederick Robinson—future prime ministers all—numbered among the recruits.

“I have no recourse but to bring forward the most promising of the young men … I should be happy to see another Pitt amongst them. I would willingly resign the government into his hands for I am fully aware of the importance of the minister being if possible in the House of Commons.”
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This was his most ardent hope, to serve only so long as it took to find or train some yet to be determined brilliant successor. Liverpool's administration seemed a caretaker government that would survive only so long as it took the Whigs and a suitable number of independents to agree upon how to divide the spoils after bringing the government down.

Yet despite all the meetings carried out behind closed doors, such agreement was not to be found. A June 11 non-confidence motion fell short by 125 votes. There would not be time for another such motion before the summer recess, and Liverpool had promised an election for September, so his government was assured survival until the voters went to the polls.

Compromises would be necessary. Accordingly, on June 18, Castlereagh rose in the House and haltingly, obviously stinging with embarrassment and biting back personal anger at having to make the concession, announced that the government would repeal the orders-in-council insofar as they affected the United States. The repeal would go
into effect on August 1 to allow time for instructions to be distributed throughout the Royal Navy. This revocation, he stressed, was conditional on America agreeing to remove all restrictions on British ships entering American ports.
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Formal repeal of the orders-in-council was ratified by both houses on June 23, and word was immediately dispatched by ship to Minister to America Augustus Foster, still believed to be in Washington. Confident that once Madison and Congress knew of the repeal they would abandon war, Castlereagh had not given the Americans further thought until learning on July 30 of the declaration of June 18—coincidentally his forty-third birthday.

Born to a prominent Anglo-Irish Dublin family, Robert Stewart had attained the courtesy title of Viscount Castlereagh when his father became an earl in 1796. Educated at Cambridge, he was just shy of his twenty-first birthday when he won election to the Irish Parliament in 1790, sitting as an independent representing County Down. Coming to London in early 1794 to attend upon a dying grandfather he deeply admired, Castlereagh was soon smitten by the twenty-two-year-old daughter of the Earl of Buckinghamshire. Grey-eyed and fair-haired, Lady Amelia Hobart, commonly known as Lady Emily, was slim, gay, and vivacious, but she also had a reputation for eccentricity that revealed itself through a predilection to be “petulant, capricious, and indiscreet.”
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Castlereagh saw only her beauty and a playful, spirited personality. After a brief courtship the two engaged to marry that June. In April, Castlereagh's grandfather passed away. Grief stricken, he turned to Lady Emily for comfort. “Your heart,” he wrote, “is too much alive not to feel for me at this moment; you have left me, as far as I am myself concerned, nothing to wish for: you have given repose to all my disquietude and opened prospects of happiness which give me a new interest in life … for God's sake, dearest Lady Emily, continue to love me, and let me some day or other have gratification to think that since you knew me your happiness has not diminished.”
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Castlereagh's devotion to his wife only grew stronger with each passing year. In a society where nobles often strayed and kept mistresses
or dallied with prostitutes, particularly when a marriage proved childless as did this one, there was never a rumour that Castlereagh even considered unfaithfulness. When away from home, his letters were regular, and occasionally he sent plaited strands of his hair to go inside a locket he had given her. The locket contained a portrait of Castlereagh at twenty-five as painted by the Regency's leading miniaturist, Richard Cosway.
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Such depth of attachment was typical of the man. Intensely loyal to friends, he expected loyalty in return. Once resolved on a course of action, Castlereagh unflinchingly committed to its implementation. This was what had made repeal of the orders-in-council so personally galling.

Throughout his political career, he had demonstrated this characteristic. Appointed chief secretary of Ireland by his relative and then lord lieutenant of Ireland Earl Camden in 1798, Castlereagh was at the forefront in quelling the revolt of that same year. The severe measures taken to crush the rebellion were not his work alone, but they were to place a lifelong stain on Castlereagh's reputation. Yet overlooked by his critics was the fact that once the rebellion was suppressed he called for a general amnesty for all but those who had incited the uprising. “It would be unwise,” he wrote, “to drive the wretched people, who are mere instruments in the hands of the more wicked, to despair.”
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The rebellion, which could easily have brought the excesses of a French-style revolution to Ireland, convinced Castlereagh that only formal union with Britain could avert an eventual slide into anarchy. Almost single-handedly he rammed passage of the Union Act through the Irish Parliament despite bitter Protestant resistance to a related bill that would emancipate Roman Catholics, who constituted 80 percent of Ireland's population. When the Union vote passed on June 7, 1800, Castlereagh claimed a personal triumph that left him proud to feel less Irish than English.

Despite his support for Catholic emancipation and a tendency to favour comparatively liberal economic and financial policies in relation to other leading Tories, Castlereagh's role in the rebellion dogged him. He was often derided as a man with “limited understanding and no knowledge,” who demonstrated “a cold-blooded contempt of every honest
public principle.”
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His manner in the House only served to accentuate the perception that he was a hard man. Lacking oratorical skill, Castlereagh came at opponents ruthlessly, ferreting out their weaknesses. His style was that of the plodding pugilist who won by bludgeoning an opponent while shrugging off the effects of every punch thrown his way, no matter how well delivered. There was a brutish quality about Castlereagh that stood at odds with the polite posturing and delicate mannerisms of the British upper classes.

“He had a natural slowness of constitution of which he was quite aware,” Lady Harriet Arbuthnot—the wife of Tory MP Charles Arbuthnot, a confidant of Wellington, and a woman who revelled in careful observation of the men at the centre of power in London—confided to her journal. He “has often told me he required the goading and violence of the House of Commons to rouse him, and that he was determined never to go into the House of Lords as they were too quiet and sleepy for him. The consequences of this temperament, and of his not having a classical education, which rendered his language involved and often incorrect, were that, when he had to make a statement or an opening speech, he was generally flat and dull and scarcely commanded the attention of the House.” Although she thought him clumsy, Lady Arbuthnot also believed he was so “gentlemanlike and so high minded” that he was one of the nation's finest leaders.
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P
arliament had recessed when the American declaration of war became known in London, and Castlereagh was dividing his time between the city and a forty-acre farm in Kent he had leased in 1810. Fourteen miles from Westminster Bridge, the farm had a small, secluded farmhouse with extensive grounds cut through by a trout stream. Following in King George III's footsteps, Castlereagh had purchased a herd of Spanish merino sheep that he bred according to the best scientific principles of the day. Lady Emily, meanwhile, established an exotic zoo to amuse her friends. A zebra was the centrepiece of a curious collection of wildlife imported from distant parts of the empire.
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