Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry (18 June 1769 – 12 August 1822), usually known as Lord Castlereagh,A practice established shortly after his death, for example in Sir C. K. Webster's 1925 work Foreign Policy of Castlereagh 1812–1815, 1815–1822 and his own half-brother's 1848–53 Mems. and Corresp. Visct. Castlereagh. It reflects his having used the name of Castlereagh so long, and the name of Londonderry so briefly, and having earned most of his reputation under the former name. Furthermore, it avoids confusion with his father, who also was Robert Stewart, Lord Londonderry. cf derived from the courtesy title Viscount Castlereagh ( ) by which he was styled from 1796 to 1821, was a British statesman. As secretary to the Viceroy in Ireland, he worked to suppress the Rebellion of 1798 and to secure passage in 1800 of the Irish Act of Union. As the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom from 1812, he was central to the management of the coalition that defeated Napoleon, and was British plenipotentiary at the Congress of Vienna. In the post-war government of Lord Liverpool, Castlereagh was seen to support harsh measures against agitation for reform, and he ended his life an isolated and unpopular figure.
Early in his career in Ireland, and following a visit to revolutionary France, Castlereagh recoiled from the democratic politics of his Presbyterian constituents in Ulster. Crossing the floor of the Irish House of Commons in support of the government, he took a leading role in detaining members of the republican conspiracy, the United Irishmen, his former political associates among them. After the 1798 Rebellion, as Chief Secretary for Ireland he pushed the Act of Union through the Irish Parliament. However, unable to overcome the resistance of King George III to the Catholic Emancipation that they believed should have accompanied the creation of a United Kingdom, both he and Prime Minister William Pitt resigned.
From 1805 Castlereagh served as Secretary of State for War in Pitt's second administration and, from 1806, under the Duke of Portland. In 1809 he was obliged to resign after fighting a duel with the foreign secretary, George Canning. In 1812, Castlereagh returned to government serving Lord Liverpool as Foreign Secretary and as Leader of the House of Commons. Castlereagh organised and financed the alliance that defeated Napoleon, bringing the powers together at the Treaty of Chaumont in 1814.
Following Napoleon's second abdication in 1815, Castlereagh worked with the European courts represented at the Congress of Vienna to frame the territorial, and broadly conservative, continental order that was to hold until mid-century. He resisted the imposition of harsh terms on France, believing that they would upset the European balance of power. After 1815, at home, Castlereagh supported repressive measures that linked him in public opinion to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Widely reviled in both Ireland and Great Britain, overworked, and personally distressed, Castlereagh died by suicide in 1822.
Early life and career in Ireland Robert was born on 18 June 1769 in 28 Henry Street, in Dublin's Northside. He was the second and only surviving child of Robert Stewart (the elder) and his wife Sarah Frances Seymour-Conway. His parents married in 1766.
The Stewarts The Stewarts had been a Scottish family settled in Donegal whose fortunes had been transformed by the marriage of Castlereagh's grandfather Alexander Stewart to an East India Company heiress. The legacy from Robert Cowan, the former Governor of Bombay, allowed for the purchase of extensive properties in north Down including the future family demesne, Mount Stewart, on the shores of Strangford Lough.
As a Presbyterian (a "Dissenter" from established Anglican church), Castlereagh's father, Robert Stewart, had an easy reputation as a friend of reform. In 1771, and again in 1776, he was elected from County Down to the Irish House of Commons. In 1778 he joined the Irish Volunteer movement, raising an armed and drilled company from his estates. In parliament and among the Volunteers, he was a friend and supporter of Lord Charlemont and his policy. This favoured Volunteer agitation for the independence of Ireland's Ascendancy parliament, but not for its reform and not for Catholic emancipation.
The elder Robert Stewart was created Baron Londonderry in 1789, Viscount Castlereagh in 1795, and Earl of Londonderry in 1796 by King George III, enabling him from the Act of Union of 1800 onwards to sit at Westminster in the House of Lords as an Irish representative peer. In 1816 he was elevated to Marquess of Londonderry. At some point, likely in advance of his elevation in 1795 to Viscount, he led his family in taking the established Anglican communion.Stewart, A.T.Q. (1995), The Summer Soldiers: The 1798 Rebellion in Antrim and Down Belfast, Blackstaff Press, p. 16 .
Young Robert's mother, Lady Sarah Frances Stewart, died in childbirth when he was a year old. She had been the daughter of Francis Seymour-Conway, 1st Marquess of Hertford, and Isabella Fitzroy, a daughter of Charles FitzRoy, 2nd Duke of Grafton. Lord Hertford was a former British Ambassador to France (1764–1765) and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1765–1766).
Five years later his father married Lady Frances Pratt, the independent-minded daughter of Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden (1714–1794), a leading English jurist and prominent political supporter of both William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, and his son, William Pitt the Younger. The marriages of the elder Robert Stewart linked his family with the upper ranks of English nobility and political elites. The Camden connection was to be especially important for the political careers of the older and the younger Robert Stewart. By Frances Pratt, his father's second wife, young Robert had eleven half-siblings, including his half-brother Charles Stewart (later Vane), Baron Stewart of Stewart's Court and Ballylawn in County Donegal (1814) and 3rd Marquess of Londonderry (1822).
Education The younger Robert Stewart had recurring health problems throughout his childhood, and was sent to The Royal School, Armagh, rather than to England for his secondary education. At the encouragement of Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden, who took a great interest in him and treated him as if he had been a grandson by blood, he later attended St. John's College, Cambridge (1786–1787), where he applied himself with greater diligence than expected from an aristocrat and excelled in his first-year examinations. But he then withdrew, pleading an illness that he admitted to Camden was something "which cannot be directly acknowledged before women", i.e. something sexually transmitted.
Irish MP In the summer of 1790, Stewart was elected as a Member of the Irish Parliament for his family's County Down constituency. In a county with an exceptionally large number of enfranchised freeholders, his campaign pitted him in a popular contest against the nominees of the county's established Ascendancy families, and on that basis alone he won the sympathy and support of Belfast's Northern Whig Club. It had been his conscious strategy to capitalise on strong Volunteer and reform sentiments.
In a letter to the Belfast Newsletter he declared for parliamentary reform (reform that would have abolished the pocket boroughs that allowed Ascendancy families, in addition to their presence in the House of Lords, to control seats in the Commons). In doing so, he won the support of many who, later despairing of parliamentary "patriots", were to enter the ranks of the United Irishmen.
In the House of Commons, Stewart spurned an offer of a place in government and sat as an independent. But otherwise, he made little impression and was judged a poor speaker.
Reflections on the Revolution in France In July 1791, having both read Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke (a family friend) and learnt that in Belfast Irish Volunteers were preparing to celebrate Bastille Day, Stewart decided to judge events in France for himself.In Spa in the Austrian Netherlands he had difficulty in empathising with the wholly reactionary outlook of the French émigrés. But after passing into France in November, he conceded that while he did not "like" the government of Ireland, "I prefer it to a revolution".
Stewart was not convinced of Burke's contention that the revolution would produce a French Cromwell, although he recognised that outside Paris the principles of liberty were not as entrenched. As the revolutionary factions, the Jacobins and Girondins, struggled for supremacy in the capital, it was "the nation at large" that would "ultimately decide between them."
In "an early example of [his] scepticism about foreign intervention", Stewart argued it was beyond her neighbours to give government to France. The Austrian Emperor might march his troops to Paris, but unless he was prepared to keep them there, the Ancien Régime restored would again collapse.
Stewart returned to the Austrian Netherlands in the autumn of 1792, but was unable to cross the now military frontlines into France. However, news of the Jacobin triumph in Paris, and, following her victory at Valmy, the prospect of France carrying defence of the revolution beyond her frontiers convinced him that "it would not be long before he had to face his own 'Jacobins' in Ireland."
Catholic relief, loyalty to Pitt When in 1793 he returned to the parliament in Dublin, Stewart spoke in favour of the Catholic Relief Bill. In doing so he was supporting the policy of British prime minister William Pitt who determined that Catholic opinion be conciliated in preparation for the impending war with the new, anti-clericalist, French Republic. While calling for the removal of their remaining civil disabilities, Stewart stopped short of endorsing extension to Catholics of the right to vote on the same forty-shilling freehold terms as Protestants that was provided in the bill. He also resisted calls to deprive the Ascendancy of their pocket boroughs, the combination of which would ensure that Catholics would form an overwhelming majority of those represented in the Irish Parliament. "Can a Protestant superstructure," he asked, "long continue supported on such base?"
However, his loyalty to Pitt now seemed unconditional. In April 1793, Stewart was gazetted a Lieutenant-Colonel in the government's new Militia, its replacement for the now proscribed Volunteers. He commanded the Londonderry Militia, being promoted to Colonel of the regiment in 1800.War Office, A List of the Officers of the Militia, the Gentlemen & Yeomanry Cavalry, and Volunteer Infantry of the United Kingdom, 11th Edn, London: War Office, 14 October 1805/Uckfield: Naval and Military Press, 2005, ISBN 978-1-84574-207-2.
In 1794, partly as a result of the promotion of his interests by his Camden connections, Stewart was offered the Government-controlled seat of Tregony in Cornwall. In 1796, he transferred to a seat for the Suffolk constituency of Orford, which was in the interest of his mother's family, the Seymour-Conways (Marquess of Hertford). He held these seats simultaneously with his county seat in Ireland.
Marriage In 1794, Stewart married Lady Amelia (Emily) Hobart, a daughter of John Hobart, 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire, a former British Ambassador to Russia (1762–1765) and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1776–1780). Her mother, Caroline Conolly, was the granddaughter of William Conolly, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons in the early 18th century and one of the wealthiest landowners in Ireland. Caroline's brother, Thomas Conolly, was married to Louisa Lennox, sister of Emily FitzGerald, Duchess of Leinster, whose son and Emily's cousin-by-marriage, Lord Edward FitzGerald, was a leader of the United Irishmen and one of their martyrs in the early stages of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.