4

Robert Stewart, Earl of Castlereagh has had a bad press over the years. Styled the “Robespierre of Ireland” by his fellow countrymen in 1798, he was held by the Irish to be even worse than Cromwell. In the lines Shelley wrote on the bloody suppression of the June riot in Manchester, later known as “Peterloo”, he is even compared with the fourth horseman of the apocalypse: « I met Murder on the way – He had a face like Castlereagh […] seven bloodhounds followed him ». Of course, he was the architect of the reactionary politics typified by the Congress of Vienna. That being said, if you measure Castlereagh with a liberal stick you are naturally going to find him wanting. However, his pragmatism was not deprived of convictions, as John Bew has recently shown in his biography of the statesman of 2011. This paper follows in the wake of Bew’s research, attempting to reveal the complex character that was Castlereagh.