page_title: Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh
section_title: Decline and death
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh / Decline and death
caption_attribution_description: English: Loring Hall, the mansion in which Robert Stewart resided, along the North Cray Road in the London Borough of Bexley.
context_page_description: Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry, KG, GCH, PC, PC, usually known as Lord Castlereagh, derived from the courtesy title Viscount Castlereagh by which he was styled from 1796 to 1821, was an Anglo-Irish statesman. As British Foreign Secretary, from 1812 he was central to the management of the coalition that defeated Napoleon. He was the principal British diplomat at the Congress of Vienna. Castlereagh was also leader of the British House of Commons in the Liverpool government from 1812 until his suicide. Early in his career, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, he was involved in putting down the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and was instrumental in securing the passage of the Irish Act of Union of 1800.
  Castlereagh's challenge at the foreign office was to organise and finance an alliance to destroy Napoleon. He successfully brought Napoleon's enemies together at the Treaty of Chaumont in 1814. Thereafter he worked with Europe's leaders at the Congress of Vienna to provide a peace consistent with the conservative mood of the day. At Vienna he was largely successful in his primary goal of creating a peace settlement that would endure for years.
context_section_description: Despite his contributions to the defeat of Napoleon and restoration of peace, Castlereagh became extremely unpopular at home. He was attacked for his construction of a peace that gave a free hand to reactionary governments on the Continent to suppress dissent. He was also condemned for his association with repressive measures of the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth (the former Prime Minister Addington). As Leader of the House of Commons for the Liverpool Government, he was often called upon to defend government policy in the House. He had to support the widely reviled measures taken by Sidmouth and the others, including the infamous Six Acts, to remain in cabinet and continue his diplomatic work. For these reasons, Castlereagh appears with other members of Lord Liverpool's Cabinet in Shelley's poem The Masque of Anarchy, which was inspired by, and heavily critical of, the Peterloo Massacre:
  I met Murder on the way –
  He had a mask like Castlereagh –
  Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
  Seven bloodhounds followed him
  All were fat; and well they might
  Be in admirable plight,
  For one by one, and two by two,
  He tossed them human hearts to chew
  Which from his wide cloak he drew.
  After the death of his father in 1821, Castlereagh became the 2nd Marquess of Londonderry. As a non-representative Irish peer, Londonderry was eligible to sit in the House of Commons though he had to leave his Irish seat and instead be elected to an English seat. In 1822, he began to suffer from a form of paranoia or a nervous breakdown. He was severely overworked with both his responsibilities in leading the government in the House and the never-ending diplomacy required to manage conflicts among the other major powers. At the time, he said "My mind, is, as it were, gone." Londonderry returned to his country seat at Woollet Hall in Water Lane, North Cray, Kent, on the advice of his doctor. Towards the end of his life there are increasing reports, both contemporaneous and in later memoirs, of exceptionally powerful rages and sudden bouts of uncharacteristic forgetfulness. He surprised his friends by admitting his belief in ghosts and other supernatural beings, in particular the "radiant boy", a figure which emerges from fire and is supposed to foretell death, which he claimed he had seen as a young man in Ireland.
  At a 9 August meeting with the King, Castlereagh was distracted, said he was being mysteriously watched by a servant, and remarked, "I am accused of the same crime as the Bishop of Clogher." Percy Jocelyn, who had been the Bishop of Clogher until the previous month, was prosecuted for homosexuality.  The King surmised that Castlereagh believed he was being blackmailed for the same reason. It remains unclear whether there was some sort of extortion attempt, and if so, whether such attempt represented a real threat of exposure, or whether the purported blackmail was a symptom of paranoia. His friends and family were alarmed and hid his razor.
  On 12 August, Castlereagh managed in the three to four minutes he was left alone to find a small knife with which he cut his own throat.
  A retrospective speculative diagnosis has linked various instances of (at the time) little explained illness to syphilis, possibly contracted at Cambridge. Stewart's undergraduate studies were interrupted by a mysterious illness first apparent during the closing months of 1787, and which kept him away from Cambridge through the summer of 1788. Later, there were unexplained illnesses in 1801 and 1807, the first described by a contemporary as "brain fever" which would be consistent with syphilitic meningitis.
caption: Castlereagh's house, Woollet Hall (now called Loring Hall), in North Cray in Bexley, south London
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