London Eh to Zed by Christopher Walters

Author:Christopher Walters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2015-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

In the Statesmen’s Aisle we find a memorial to Robert Stewart (1769–1822), Viscount Castlereagh, an Anglo-Irish statesman renowned for his diplomatic skills in Europe. Yet when it came to the affairs of North America, his talents were a little less obvious.

Castlereagh Memorial: A Millstone Around His Neck

Castlereagh was a tall, painfully thin man who always looked bored and was fond of dressing in black. In January 1812, he became Britain’s foreign minister and immediately faced off against a man half his height but many times his ambition: the French military dictator Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821).

Focused on Britain’s war against Napoleon, Castlereagh miscalculated the anger of Americans over his country’s heavy-handed control of the seas to blockade France. Raids on U.S. ships and impressment of their British-born sailors into the Royal Navy angered Americans and confirmed to them Britain “ruled the waves, and waived the rules.” So they declared war and invaded Canada.

The result was our War of 1812, a war within a war. The fact that Canada fended off a U.S. invasion owed much to the loyalty of French Canadians, a small but superior British land force, and, not insignificantly, timid American military men.[13] But no thanks was owed to Castlereagh, who described the conflict in North America as a millstone and wanted to end it quickly.[14] When the Americans sent a high-level delegation to Ghent to negotiate a peace, he sent second-rate officials who abandoned Britain’s First Nation allies and gave back territory Britain had won. Some were left wondering whose side Castlereagh was really on.

In later years, Castlereagh became increasingly neurotic, to the point where the Duke of Wellington told him “you cannot be in your right mind.”[15] To prevent suicide, he was stripped of all knives, razors, and pistols. To no effect. One morning Castlereagh found a small pocket knife and cut his own throat. Immortality in Westminster Abbey wasn’t kind either. The poet George Lord Byron (1788–1824) suggested the epitaph:

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