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Updated: June 8, 2025
The following mixed metaphor is said to have been taken from one of his speeches: "Ministers were not to look on like Crocodiles, with their hands in their breeches' pockets, doing nothing." The story regarding Castlereagh's Radiant Boy, is that one night, when he was in barracks and alone, he saw a figure glide from the fireplace, the face becoming brighter as it approached him.
Mr Foster, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons in those days the Speaker actually spoke, a whimsical Irish custom tore the cloak off Lord Castlereagh's strutting statesmanship, and laid bare his real motives. Speaking on the first Union proposal in 1799 he said: "But the noble Lord has told us the real motives of this scheme of Union, and I thank him for stating them so fairly.
Meantime the war must go on with the chances favoring British arms, for the Bramble had also brought the alarming news of Napoleon's defeat on the plains of Leipzig. Now for the first time Great Britain could concentrate all her efforts upon the campaign in North America. No wonder the President accepted Castlereagh's offer with alacrity.
Just as the revolution of 1820 had spread through southern Europe in spite of Castlereagh's attempt to maintain that it was not of a contagious order, so that of 1830 awakened similar outbursts not only at Brussels but in various German states, in Switzerland, in Poland, and in Italy.
Do you hear that poor Lord Grey is said to be haunted by a vision of Lord Castlereagh's head? It sounds like a temptation of the devil to scare him into cutting his throat. Lord Brougham and the Duke of Wellington seem to me the only two men likely to keep their heads in these times of infinite political perturbation; but the one is made of steel, and the other of india-rubber.
The whole voice of Liberal public opinion at once proclaimed that Canning was the only man left in the country who was capable of redeeming England's foreign policy from the discredit and disgrace brought upon it by Castlereagh's Administration.
There were to be five or six Great Powers, whose independence was to be above suspicion and whose strength was to be restrained by the jealous watchfulness of one another. If any one State, like France under Napoleon, grew too powerful, all the rest were to combine to restrain it. Now, there is a good deal in common between Castlereagh's idea and that of the League of Nations.
In Castlereagh's scheme it would not much matter if one of the weights were a little heavier than the others, because there would be four or five of these others to counterbalance it; and his assumption was that these other Powers would naturally combine for the purpose of redressing the balance and preserving the peace. But a simple balance between two opposing forces is a very different thing.
His first work indeed as a minister was to meet the danger in which Canning had involved the country by his Orders in Council. On the 23rd of June, only twelve days after the ministry had been formed, these Orders were repealed. But, quick as was Castlereagh's action, events had moved even more quickly.
Castlereagh's language was commonplace, uncouth, and sometimes even ridiculous, and it happened only too often that in his anxiety to get his words out he became positively inarticulate.
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