Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769-1822) The son of an Irish peer, Castlereagh conceived an intense antipathy to revolutionary movements as a result of a trip to Paris in 1791 as the French Revolution entered its darker phase. Already a Member of the Irish Parliament, his election to the British Parliament in 1794 was arranged by Pitt, but over the next six years his main preoccupation was with Irish affairs, as he helped to design the scheme for the union of Britain and Ireland and urged Pitt to concede Catholic emancipation. After the Union he held a number of offices under Addington, Pitt, Portland and Perceval. On Perceval's assassination in 1812 Castlereagh's old rival, George Canning (with whom he fought a duel on Putney Heath in 1809) failed in his bid to succeed to the premiership, and Castlereagh, already Foreign Secretary, became Leader of the Commons in the government headed by the Earl of Liverpool. Over the next ten years he was placed under enormous strain as he negotiated the end of the war with France, the period of political unrest which resulted in the Peterloo massacre of 1819, and the shabby affair of the divorce of King George IV and Queen Caroline. In 1822, following some form of mental breakdown, he took his own life.

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