The tomb of Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, lies in Westminster Abbey between those of William Pitt and Charles James Fox. Few would claim that he played a more important role than either Pitt or Fox in shaping the era of revolution and war of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, at a time when events in Britain, Ireland, Europe, and beyond became closely interconnected and unpredictable and even cataclysmic, Castlereagh was an influential figure, and Paul Bew succeeds admirably in this detailed study explaining why. Well-organized, fluently written, and exhaustively researched, Bew's biography will be welcomed by all who wish to know about Castlereagh's life and times.
Castlereagh was born in 1769 into a political and landowning Ulster family that enjoyed links through blood and marriage with key members of the Anglo-Irish establishment, bringing patronage and friendships that would facilitate his rise. He suffered ill health as a child, and sickness interrupted his time at Cambridge in the mid-1780s. In 1794, he married Amelia, known as Emily, daughter of the Earl of Buckinghamshire. Theirs was a bond of “obvious affection” and their “companionship . . . was deep and genuine” (77). She was also an asset as a political hostess, but there were no children, and Castlereagh's enemies suggested that he was impotent or perhaps homosexual. Bew mentions these possibilities and the suggestion that Castlereagh contracted syphilis while at Cambridge, which might account for the periods of incapacity from which he suffered in later life. In adulthood he could be awkward and reserved but also confident and sociable. He developed strong enmities as well as strong affinities.
Elected to the Irish parliament in 1790, Castlereagh made his mark as chief secretary, helping to tackle the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and building support for legislative union with Britain. Within a few years he was in the British government, and later, at the height of his powers, foreign secretary and leader of the House of Commons (1812–22). In describing the early part of his career, Bew employs an “Enlightenment and apostasy” paradigm. Castlereagh's commitment to reform weakened because of the excesses of the French Revolution. Though not unimpressed by the Enlightenment, he was wary of extremism and rather pessimistic—both conservative and enlightened, and therefore not the blinkered reactionary imagined by some contemporary and subsequent commentators. A Presbyterian, but moderate, Castlereagh advocated religious toleration. His creed was “civic rather than confessional” (91). After 1798, he complained that fanatical leaders had played on sectarian feeling. As for the union, he had no doubt that it promised strength and security for Ireland. There is, insists Bew, “no truth in the allegation that he raised Catholic hopes for emancipation as a cynical ploy to push the Union through” (142).
One of his most notorious actions, of course, was the duel with George Canning in 1809. Bew labels Canning “duplicitous” (257). On this as on much else, Bew endorses Castlereagh's verdict. The duel was fought after a serious disagreement on war policy and months of secret lobbying by Canning to have Castlereagh removed from office. It left Castlereagh's personal honor satisfied, but he had to rebuild his public reputation. He did so, managing the war against Napoleon with skill and vision, and serving Britain well as one of the architects of the postwar settlement. Bew dismisses the claim that he was duped by Britain's allies and warns that it would be a mistake to minimize the differences between Castlereagh's policy and the counterrevolutionary aims of Austria and Russia. He worked with the allies because he had to, not because he was ideologically one with them. After 1815, he could not sanction their interference in the domestic affairs of other states, and when Canning took over as foreign secretary, the policy did not change. Both were anti-interventionists. If their methods differed, this was because “Castlereagh and Canning operated under very different circumstances” (582).
Castlereagh took his own life in 1822. Bew does not wish to speculate beyond the available evidence, according to which the causes are to be found in “political pressure and mental exhaustion” (556). In connection with this, Castlereagh was worried about his reputation: for a long time, and especially after the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, he was vilified as an oppressor of the people; in addition, there was talk of corruption, leading him to commence libel proceedings shortly before his death.
Bew's work is a major achievement, though not without weaknesses. Some readers will wish that he had been more disciplined and selective. The narrative is often dense. Some readers might think that less attention should have been paid to this or that part of Castlereagh's career and more to others (the relationship with Pitt and the politics of the early 1800s might have been covered more effectively). There are errors in the text (dates and the titles of offices). Perhaps, like many biographers, Bew is overly sympathetic. Criticism of Castlereagh is rarely left unanswered. He might have been a poor speaker, but this is no reflection on the quality of his mind, Bew contends. A fair point, but Castlereagh was a poor speaker nonetheless—a big disadvantage in an age of great orators. On the crucial events, Bew's judgments are not new, and he admits this. He also makes clear his debt to Charles Webster's work on Castlereagh's foreign policy, published in 1931. Although much in the book is unsurprising, however, one cannot fail to appreciate the scholarly expertise it exhibits.
Bew states in his preface that “neither Castlereagh's admirers nor his detractors have fully understood this enigmatic man” (xii). Castlereagh: A Life casts light on its subject's character, circumstances, and priorities, and in doing so, it accomplishes its somewhat modest goals: “to consider Castlereagh on his own terms, in the time in which he lived, and to understand his foreign policy within the broader context of his career” (xii).
